Reliability, validity, and responsiveness of a smartphone-based manikin to support pain self-reporting

Van Der Veer, Sabine N., Ali, S. Mustafa, Yu, Ziqiao, McBeth, John, Chiarotto, Alessandro, James, Ben and Dixon, William G. (2024) Reliability, validity, and responsiveness of a smartphone-based manikin to support pain self-reporting. Pain Reports, 9 (2), E1131. (doi:10.1097/PR9.0000000000001131).

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Many people worldwide suffer from chronic pain. Improving our knowledge on chronic pain prevalence and management requires methods to collect pain self-reports in large populations. Smartphone-based tools could aid data collection by allowing people to use their own device, but the measurement properties of such tools are largely unknown.

OBJECTIVES: To assess the reliability, validity, and responsiveness of a smartphone-based manikin to support pain self-reporting.

METHODS: We recruited people with fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, and/or osteoarthritis and access to a smartphone and the internet. Data collection included the Global Pain Scale at baseline and follow-up, and 30 daily pain drawings completed on a 2-dimensional, gender-neutral manikin. After deriving participants' pain extent from their manikin drawings, we evaluated convergent and discriminative validity, test-retest reliability, and responsiveness and assessed findings against internationally agreed criteria for good measurement properties.

RESULTS: We recruited 131 people; 104 were included in the full sample, submitting 2185 unique pain drawings. Manikin-derived pain extent had excellent test-retest reliability (intraclass correlation coefficient, 0.94), moderate convergent validity (ρ, 0.46), and an ability to distinguish fibromyalgia and osteoarthritis from rheumatoid arthritis (F statistics, 30.41 and 14.36, respectively; P < 0.001). Responsiveness was poor (ρ, 0.2; P, 0.06) and did not meet the respective criterion for good measurement properties.

CONCLUSION: Our findings suggest that smartphone-based manikins can be a reliable and valid method for pain self-reporting, but that further research is warranted to explore, enhance, and confirm the ability of such manikins to detect a change in pain over time.

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Contributors

Author: John McBeth

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