Reliability assessment of measuring active wrist pronation and supination range of motion with a smartphone

This study aimed to improve clinical examination techniques by determining the reliability of different methods to evaluate forearm movements. Two. methods using the iPhone (TM) 5 and its gyroscope application (alone [15] or attached to a selfie stick [ISS]) were compared with two conventional measurement devices (a plastic goniometer with a hand-held pencil [HHP] and a bubble goniometer [BG]) to evaluate the active range of movement (AROM) of the wrist during pronation and supination. Two independent groups of subjects took part in this prospective single-center diagnostic study: 20 healthy subjects and 20 patients. The four evaluation methods had high intra-observer consistency after three measurements (intra-class correlation coefficient [ICC] [3, 1] of 0.916 for the HHP; 0.944 for ISS; 0.925 for BG; 0.933 for 15) and excellent inter-observer reliability (ICC [2, k] of 0.926 for HHP; 0.934 for ISS; 0.899 for BG; 0.894 for 15), with an agreement of plus or minus 2 degrees. When these devices are used with rigorous methodology, they are reliable for the goniometric evaluation of AROM of wrist pronation and supination. (C) 2017 SFCM. Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.