Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Rehabilitation and Assistive Technologies
Date Submitted: Oct 23, 2017
Open Peer Review Period: Oct 24, 2017 - Dec 19, 2017
Date Accepted: Jan 2, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Physiotherapy Questionnaires App to Deliver Main Musculoskeletal Assessment Questionnaires: Development and Validation Study
Background:
Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) translate subjective outcomes into objective data that can be quantified and analyzed. Nevertheless, the use of PROs in their traditional paper format is not practical for clinical practice due to limitations associated with the analysis and management of the data. To address the need for a viable way to group and utilize the main functioning assessment tools in the field of musculoskeletal disorders, the Physiotherapy Questionnaires app was developed.
Objective:
This study aims to explain the development of the app, to validate it using two questionnaires, and to analyze whether participants prefer to use the app or the paper version of the questionnaires.
Methods:
In the first stage, the app for an Android operational system was developed. In the second stage, the aim was to select questionnaires that were most often used in musculoskeletal clinical practice and research. The Foot and Ankle Outcome Score (FAOS) and American Orthopaedic Foot and Ankle Society (AOFAS) questionnaire were selected to validate the app. In total, 50 participants completed the paper and app versions of the AOFAS and 50 completed the FAOS. The study’s outcomes were the correlation of the data between the paper and app versions as well as the preference of the participants between the two versions.
Results:
The app was approved by experts after the adaptations of the layout for mobile phones and a total of 18 questionnaires were included in the app. Moreover, the app allows the generation of PDF and Excel files with the patients’ data. In regards to validity, the mean of the total scores of the FAOS were 91.54% (SD 8.86%) for the paper version and 91.74% (SD 9.20%) for the app. There was no statistically significant differences in the means of the total scores or the subscales (P=.11-.94). The mean total scores for the AOFAS were 93.94 (SD 8.47) for the paper version and 93.96 (SD 8.48) for the app. No statistically significant differences were found for the total scores for the AOFAS or the subscales (P>.99). The app showed excellent agreement with the paper version of the FAOS, with an ICC value of 0.98 for the total score (95% CI 0.98-0.99), which was also found for the AOFAS with the ICC for the total score of 0.99 (95% CI 0.98-0.99). For compliance, 72% (36/50) of the participants in the FAOS group and 94% (47/50) in the AOFAS group preferred the app version.
Conclusions:
The Physiotherapy Questionnaires app showed validity and high levels of compliance for the FAOS and AOFAS, which indicates it is not inferior to the paper version of these two questionnaires and confirms its viability and feasibility for use in clinical practice.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
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.