Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jun 21, 2024
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 16, 2024 - Aug 11, 2024
Date Accepted: Aug 12, 2025
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Development and reliability of the “Mobile-Constant”: a self-reporting method for shoulder function evaluation
ABSTRACT
Background:
The Constant-Murley scale is a well-established method for shoulder functional evaluation. However, the requirement of clinician input restricts its usage in follow-up. How to conduct remote assessment is one of the most important problems in telemonitoring.
Objective:
To develop a self-reporting Constant-Murley scale and evaluate its reliability by comparing the results with human raters.
Methods:
In this study, we presented this “Mobile Constant” method that can evaluated shoulder function through mobile phone. It was composed of three main parts. The subjective items were assessed by questionnaires; the range of motion was estimated through human pose estimation algorithm, and the abduction strength was evaluated by using data from embedded IMU sensors. After data collecting, six machine learning classifiers were constructed to concluded the Constant results. Between Feb 2022 to Feb 2023, patients presented in our hospital with shoulder complaints were invited to participate in this study. Data collected in the first nine months were used for model training while data from the subsequent three months were used for testing. The results of the proposed methods were compared to the human rater to assess the reliability and presented with intra-class correlation coefficients.
Results:
Data from 111 patients with shoulder pain and stiffness were collected (83 patients for training and 28 for testing). For the evaluation of range of motion, the difference between the proposed method and the human rater was 0.59±3.32, with an ICC value ranging from 0.898 to 0.956. As for the assessment of abduction strength, the final accuracy had reached 78.6%.
Conclusions:
This study presents a self-reporting Constant scaling method. The results indicated that the “Mobile Constant” is a reliable tool for the patient to report their shoulder function during follow-up by only using their mobile phone. Clinical Trial: This study has been registrated in the First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University (2021[387]).
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