Validity, Reliability, Feasibility, and Usefulness of Pain Monitor

Abstract

The new assessment protocol in the app allows for an easy and rapid multidimensional assessment of chronic pain patients.

Methodological Quality of Manuscripts Reporting on the Usability of Mobile Applications for Pain Assessment and Management: A Systematic Review

“…Furthermore, there was an inconsistency between what was reported in the methodology section and the results presented. For example, some studies reported to have collected the number of errors (task error rate) or to have used a specific instrument but did not report on these results in the manuscript results section [37], [31,39,41,42]. mHealth solutions have the potential to foster self-assessment and self-management for patients suffering from pain and have a positive impact on their overall functioning and quality of life.…”

“…A more detailed analysis shows that all manuscripts, except one (out of 31) [51] assessed usability using appropriate procedures for the app development phase, but only two (out of 31) reported to have used an investigator adequately trained [35,40], and only one (out of 31) refers that the investigator responsible for usability assessment was external to the product development process [29]. Of the 31 manuscripts included, 11 used valid instruments to assess usability [19,29,31,[41][42][43]45,48,[55][56][57], but only nine triangulated methods of usability assessment [19,39,40,43,47,49,50,55,57]. The detailed results on the methodological quality assessment are presented in Table 2.…”

“…For example, two studies of De La Vega et al report, in their methods, recording of errors and use of SUS, however, they do not provide data on the number of errors neither present the final score of the SUS in the results section [39,40]. Similarly, other authors report the use of SUS, but do not provide its final score [31,41,42].…”

“…Regarding the involvement of end-users in usability assessment, 23 manuscripts assessed apps that were intended for individuals with specific pathologies and used a sample of individuals with characteristics similar to the target group of end-users for usability assessment [19,29,[31][32][33][34][36][37][38][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53]. Participants in these studies included, among others, individuals with fibromyalgia and other rheumatological diseases [37,38,40,43,44], and individuals with headaches [29,32,33,[45][46][47][48], cancer-related pain [36,[49][50][51], or chronic pain in general [19,41,52,53], individuals with Down syndrome [34] and individuals who are wheelchair users [31,42]. Of these 23 studies, five al...…”

The Use of Information and Communication Technologies in Perinatal Depression Screening: A Systematic Review

“…62 In fact, the use of smartphone apps is argued to be the current gold standard assessment method in health settings as it reduces costs (phone calls by the health care professional are substituted for a continuous assessment with the app), it allows for telemonitoring (it captures and communicates data in real time), it is ecological (mothers can answer wherever they are removing the need to connect to their computer at home or to travel to the clinic), and it is minimally invasive (mothers can decide when to answer to the app, which is more difficult when phone calls are used for assessment). 63 Also importantly, there is recent evidence to suggest that the use mobile devices when administering validated screening scales does not affect data equivalence compared with traditional assessment modes, such as paper 64,65 and that less personal assessment tools (e.g., mail as opposed to phone calls) result in higher PeD prevalence rates, 43 supporting the use of more impersonal screening tools, such as smartphone apps, in PeD.…”