A Systematic Literature Review of the Pain Management Mobile Applications: Toward Building a Conceptual Model

Abstract

In healthcare, mobile-based interventions support the improvement of clinical process and result in a positive behavioral change and improve the patients' health condition. This study aims at reviewing mobile applications documented for pain management in the scientific databases, to identify the key factors that are vital for pain management. In this research, a systematic literature review was conducted on the selected studies collected from five scientific databases: Medline, PubMed, EMBASE, Web of Science and Scopus. After applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria and performing the quality assessment, twenty-five studies were finalized. It has been observed that the apps were not all-inclusive in features to provide an effective pain self-management solution. As found from the review, the general features of the pain management mobile applications are pain information, pain coping strategy, social support, subgoals and achievements, self-reporting, feedback, and patient report. Some apps involved psychological interventions. A prominent technique found was cognitive behavior therapy. This study has contributed to the body of knowledge by proposing a conceptual model in guiding the development of pain management mobile applications. The conceptual model was evaluated by a panel of experts to evaluate comprehensiveness, accuracy, and dependencies among the elements of the model, and the appropriateness of the proposed model. Experts recognized the importance of pain management and provided positive feedback to the proposed model. INDEX TERMSConceptual model, mobile applications, m-health, pain, self-management, systematic literature review.

Towards the Development of a Web-Based Application for Chronic Pain Management Using Persuasive Technology

“…In order to properly develop a pain management system, past studies that have discussed such systems must be properly reviewed. Most of the existing studies about pain management systems are about mobile applications (Solem et al 2020;Yang et al 2018;Bhatia et al 2021;Koumpouros 2021;Shah and Chiew 2019;Slepian et al 2020) while there are some that focused on web applications (Oldenmenger et al 2017;Richardson et al 2021;Tipprom et al 2018) because it allowed users to access the system on multiple devices or platforms (Oldenmenger et al 2017;Tipprom et al 2018). In most available pain management systems, it allowed for the users to assess their pain through some sort of form or questionnaire.…”

“…One of the things that were mentioned was the existence of pain assessment where a user could answer a questionnaire ( Yang et al 2018;Bhatia et al 2021;Koumpouros 2021;Slepian et al 2020), or a scale (Finnerup 2019;Yang et al 2018;Bhatia et al 2021;Slepian et al 2020;Oldenmenger et al 2017;Tipprom et al 2018), to provide details about their pain. Furthermore, non-pharmacological pain strategies were also mentioned to manage pain such as psychological interventions (Finnerup 2019;Devan et al 2019;Ghai et al 2020;Yang et al 2018;Shah and Chiew 2019;Majeeda et al 2018;Honzel et al 2019;Cheever et al 2018) and physical therapies (Finnerup 2019;Ghai et al 2020;Tipprom et al 2018;Akhtar et al 2017). The integration of persuasive technology in pain management system was also mentioned in past studies for motivation and engagement (Varsi et al 2021;Solem et al 2020).…”