Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Pediatrics and Parenting
Date Submitted: Aug 20, 2022
Date Accepted: Sep 23, 2022
Validation of an electronic Visual Analog Scale App for pain evaluation in children and adolescents with Symptomatic Hypermobility: A cross-sectional study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Rapid advances in mobile electronic App for clinical data collection of pain evaluation have resulted in more efficient data handling and analysis than traditional paper-based approaches. As paper-based visual analogue scale (p-VAS) scores are commonly used to assess pain level, new emerging App needs to be validated prior to clinical application with symptomatic children and adolescents.
Objective:
To assess the validity and reliability of an electronic visual analogue scale (e-VAS) method via a Mobile Health (mHealth) App in children and adolescents diagnosed with hypermobility spectrum disorder/hypermobile Ehlers Danlos syndrome (HSD/HEDS) compared to the traditional p-VAS.
Methods:
Children diagnosed with HSD/HEDS aged 5 to 18 years were recruited from a Sports Medicine Centre in Sydney (Australia). Consenting participants in a randomly assigned order to the e-VAS and p-VAS platforms were asked to indicate their current lower limb pain level and completed pain assessment e-VAS / p-VAS at one time point. Instrument agreement between the two methods was determined by Interclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and Bland–Altman analysis.
Results:
Forty-three children with HSD/HEDS aged 11±3.8 years (Mean age±S.D) were recruited and completed this study. Bland-Altman analysis showed a difference of 0.19±0.95 with limits of agreement -1.67 to 2.04. The ICC of 0.87 (95% CI 0.78- 0.93) indicated good reliability.
Conclusions:
These findings suggest that the e-VAS mHealth App is a validated tool and a feasible method of collecting pain recording scores when compared with the traditional paper format in children and adolescents with HSD/HEDS. The e-VAS App can be reliably utilised for paediatric pain evaluation and it could potentially be introduced into daily clinical practice to improve real-time symptoms monitoring even remotely.
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