Contrasting the Expectations and Experiences of Mobile Health Use on Chronic Pain: a Questionnaire Study (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Chronic pain is a prolonged condition that deteriorates one's quality of life. Treating chronic pain requires a multi-component approach, and in many cases, there are no silver bullet solutions. Mobile health (m-Health) is a rapidly expanding category of solutions in digital health with proven potential in chronic pain management. OBJECTIVE This study aims to contrast the viewpoints of two groups of people with chronic pain concerning m-Health: people who have adopted the use of m-Health and those who have not. We highlight the benefits of m-Health solutions for people with chronic pain and the perceived obstacles to their increased adoption. We provide recommendations to encourage people to try m-Health solutions as part of their self-care. METHODS The Prolific crowdsourcing platform was used to collect crowdsourced data. A screening questionnaire was released to determine what type of pain potential participants have and if they are currently using m-Health solutions for chronic pain. The participants were invited based on their experience using m-Health to manage their pain. Similar questions were presented to m-Health users and m-Health non-users. Qualitative and quantitative analyses were performed to determine the outcomes of this study. RESULTS 31 responses were collected from people (ages 19-63, M=31.4, SD=12.1) with chronic pain who use m-Health solutions. Two-thirds (64.5%) of users identified as female and 35.4% as male. We match these m-Health users with an equal number of non-users: 31 responses from the pool of 361 participants in the screening questionnaire. Non-user’s ages ranged from 18 to 58 years (M = 30.8, SD =11.09) with 50% identified as female and 50% as male. Likert-scale questions were analysed using the Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon (MWW) test. Results show that the two groups have a significantly differing stance on 10 of the 23 questions and share similar views in the remaining 13 questions. The most significant differences are related to privacy and interactions with health professionals. 39% of m-Health users (vs. 71% of non-users) declared that using m-Health solutions has made interacting with health or social care professionals easier. The majority of 84% of non-users (vs. about half of the users, 48%) expressed concern about sharing their data with e.g., third parties. CONCLUSIONS This study investigated how m-Health is currently used in the context of chronic pain and what expectations m-Health non-users have for m-Health as a future chronic pain management tool. Analysis revealed contrasts between m-Health use expectations and actual usage experiences, highlighting privacy concerns toward m-Health solutions. Generally, the results showed that non-users were more concerned about data privacy and expected m-Health to facilitate interacting with health professionals. The users, in contrast, felt that such connections do not exist.