JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Digital health solutions can provide musculoskeletal populations with high-reach, low-cost, easily accessible, and scalable patient education and self-management interventions that meet time and resource restrictions.

Objective:

The main objective is to determine the effectiveness of digital health interventions for people with musculoskeletal pain conditions (i.e. low back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, knee pain, elbow pain, ankle pain and whiplash).

Methods:

We searched the PubMed National Library of Medicine database (from 1974 to August 2021), and selected randomized, controlled trials of digital health interventions in the target population of musculoskeletal pain patients with a minimum follow-up of 1 month. Two researchers independently screened and extracted the data.

Results:

A total of 56 eligible studies were included covering 9359 participants, with a mean follow-up of 25 weeks. In moderate quality evidence, digital health interventions had a small effect on pain (standardized mean difference (SMD), 0.19; 95% confidence interval [95% CI], 0.06 to 0.32), disability (SMD, 0.14; 95% CI, 0.03 to 0.25), quality of life (SMD, 0.22; 95% CI, 0.07 to 0.36), emotional functioning (SMD, 0.24; 95% CI, 0.12 to 0.35) and self-management (SMD, 0.14; 95% CI, 0.05 to 0.24).

Conclusions:

Moderate quality-evidence supports the conclusion that digital health interventions are effective to reduce pain and improve functioning and self-management in musculoskeletal pain conditions. Low quality evidence indicated that digital health can improve quality of life and global treatment improvement. There are few research on the influence of digital health on expenses, knowledge, overall improvement, range of motion, muscle strength, and fidelity of implementation.