The Promises and Pitfalls of Leveraging Mobile Health Technology for Pain Care: Table 1

Abstract

Mobile health technology (mHealth) includes cell phones, smartphones, and wearable sensors that offer several putative advantages over customary approaches when generating and/or communicating personal data from patients with acute, cancer, and non-cancer pain. Due to their flexibility, simplicity, and increasing affordability, mHealth devices represent a new generation of tools with the potential to improve pain management by reliably and safely collecting pain, function, and activity data outside of the clinical setting and facilitate delivery of interventions (e.g., instruction in cognitive-behavioral methods of pain management). mHealth is defined as “handheld [or wearable] transmitting device[s] with multi-functional capabilities [that can be] used to store, transmit and receive health information and has user control over the access to the health information.” ⇓ The growing popularity of mobile devices among patients means that clinical data can be collected while patients engage in their usual daily activities. These data have substantial potential to impact patient care in a number of ways to include informing clinician decision-making for symptom management, promoting positive patient behavior change through real-time feedback, and providing supplemental data that enrich patient–provider communication. In the near future, collecting and sharing mHealth data between patients and multiple authorized stakeholders will produce new and perhaps revolutionary models of health care delivery including pain care ⇓. The promise of mHealth does not come without potential pitfalls. The design of mHealth devices may have significant effects on data quality and accuracy. Design issues are of particular concern for older patients as many experience functional (e.g., physical and cognitive) changes with age. Other considerations include the ways in which mHealth-derived data can be optimally presented to health care providers and caregivers, and protecting them from being overwhelmed by a sea of data. Indeed, a review of 111 pain apps for patient use (released on the market in …