Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Rehabilitation and Assistive Technologies
Date Submitted: Jul 21, 2023
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 21, 2023 - Sep 15, 2023
Date Accepted: Sep 14, 2023
Date Submitted to PubMed: Oct 2, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
A Systematic Review of Available Assistive Technology Outcome Measures
ABSTRACT
Background:
Introduction: World Health Organization claimed that measuring outcomes is necessary to understand the benefits of assistive technology and create evidence-based policies and systems to ensure universal access to it. Specifically, in clinical practice, there is an increasing need for standardized methods to track individual assistive technology (AT) interventions using outcome assessment
Objective:
Objective:
This review has been undertaken to provide an overview of available outcome measures that can be used at the follow-up stage of any AT interventions and integrated into the daily clinical or service practice.
Methods:
Methods:
We systematically searched for original manuscripts regarding available and used AT outcome measures by looking for titles and abstracts in the PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science databases up to March 2023
Results:
Results:
We analyzed 955 articles, of which 50 were included. Within these, 53 instruments have been mentioned and used to provide an AT outcome measure assessment. The most widely used tool is the Quebec User Evaluation of Satisfaction with Assistive Technology, followed by the Psychosocial Impact of Assistive Technology Scale. Moreover, the identified measures address eight AT outcome domains: functional efficacy, satisfaction, psychosocial impact, caregiver burden, quality of life, participation, confidence and usability. The AT category “Assistive products for activities and participation relating to personal mobility and transportation” was the most involved in the reviewed articles.
Conclusions:
Discussion and Conclusion: Among the 53 cited instruments, only 17 scales (about 30%) were designed to evaluate specifically assistive devices. 34 instruments were only mentioned once to denote poor uniformity and concordance in the instruments to be used, limiting the possibility of comparing the results of studies. This work could represent a good guide for promoting the use of validated AT outcome measures in clinical practice that can be helpful to AT assessment teams in their everyday activities and the improvement of clinical practice.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.