Scoliosis management through apps

Abstract

Scoliosis is a curvature of the spine often found in adolescents. Commonly the management of patients with scoliosis is done through manual methods or web applications. Web applications require the doctor or patient to upload data, after taking scoliosis measurements with some separate instrument. More recently, applications that can be downloaded on smartphones (the so called apps), have been integrated into the clinical practice of scoliosis management. These applications allow to take scoliosis measurements directly, without the need to upload data by the user, thanks to the use of the smartphone sensors. In this paper, we first define some qualitative criteria to evaluate such apps and then we evaluate some relevant apps for scoliosis management. The criteria of evaluation taken into consideration include: Availability, Technology, Measurement, Functions and Qualitative evaluation. Each criterion represents an aspect of the apps and serves to characterize them. Apps-based scoliosis management offers several advantages both on the doctor and on the patient side. For example, from the patient's point of view the app may be useful to continuously and easily monitor scoliosis at home, while the doctor can monitor the scoliosis evolution along the time reducing the number of visits to the patient.