Psychometric Properties of a Mobile Application in Pressure Ulcers for Patients With Spinal Cord Injuries (SCI)

Current methods to assess superficial size and area of pressure ulcers are either time-consuming (using Transparency Tracings techniques), costly (computers, softwares), or necessitating to touch the patient's skin (using commun rulers).

A free smartphone application (for IOS or Android) has recently been developed to measures skin lesions. It is called imitoMeasure. It does not require any contact with the patient. A photograph is taken with the smartphone, the limits of the lesion is then drawn with the health carers' finger on the phone's screen. The application computes the length, width and surface of the ulcer.

This technique has not yet been validated, although it has been used to measure various types of skin lesions.

The objective of this study is to validate this measurement technique on a sample of pressure ulcer in a population of patients with spinal cord injury (SCI). Reliability is assessed by comparison to the currently most frequently used techniques (Transparency Tracings and ruler-based), and fiability is assessed by intra-rater and inter-rater correlations.

imitoMeasure is a new smartphone application to measure wounds size. The present study assesses validity of the measure against common measures (ruler-based and transparency tracings), and the inter- and intra-rater reliability.