Targeted Back Care Application

Back pain is very prevalent in the UK and worldwide. 49% of the adult UK population experience at least 24 hours of back pain during the year, with 80% of adults experiencing back pain during their lifetimes. Back pain is also currently the dominant focus of pain clinics, taking up signicant time and resources, which could have a huge impact if freed up. Clearly back pain is both an important problem and a signicant drain on health service resources. 

The UK NHS recognises that “Most cases of back pain do not require medical attention and can be treated with over-the-counter painkillers and self-care.” 

The prevalence of back pain and consequent demands on GPs time suggests that an alternative diagnosis method (particularly for cases of minor backpain) could have very positive advantages and so a personal health app could make self care more practical. The app on OpenClinical is designed to capture key pieces of data in a standardised way (such as age, weight, and gender), diagnose the pain as one of a number of common types, and give personalised advice on how to deal with it. By tailoring the advice to the individual and his/her personal risk factors and backgorund we hope to provide advice that is more useful than that found in general sources like web sites, patient leaflets et.

Although the authors have attempted to provide good coverage of currently available knowledge and capture best practice in its advice the app should be viewed as a prototype. It has not been evaluated in a systematic trial, and should not be trusted for use until such a trial has been carried out.