JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The use of health apps to support the treatment of chronic pain is gaining importance. Most available pain apps are still lacking in quality and quantity of their content, as their developers do not involve health experts to ensure target group suitability. Neither do they use gamification to engage and motivate the user.

Objective:

To close this gap in research, the aim of this study was to evaluate the quality of the gamified pain management app “Pain-Mentor” through experts from the field of chronic pain management and to assess their opinion on combining pain management with gamification.

Methods:

Eleven health professionals with a background in chronic pain treatment participated in this study. Each expert first received a detailed presentation of the app. Afterwards they tested Pain-Mentor and then rated its quality using the mobile application rating scale (MARS) in a semi-structured interview.

Results:

The experts found the app to be of excellent general (M 4.51, SD 0.54) and subjective quality (M 4.51, SD 0.31). The app specific section was rated as good (M 4.27, SD 0.76). Overall, the experts approved of the app’s content, namely pain and stress management techniques, behavior change techniques and gamification. They believe that the use of gamification in health apps positively influences patients’ motivation and engagement and thus, has the potential to promote the learning of pain management techniques.

Conclusions:

The experts rated the gamified pain management app to be of excellent quality. It can be concluded that experts perceive the use of gamification in the context of pain management apps in a positive manner. This shows that combining pain management with gamification did not negatively affect the app’s integrity.