Chronic pain, including arthritis, affects about 100 million adults in the United States. Complexity and diversity of pain experience across time and people and its fluctuations across and within days show the need for valid pain reports that do not rely on patient’s long-term recall capability. Smartwatches can be used as digital ecological momentary assessment (EMA) tools for real-time collection of pain scores. Smartwatches are generally less expensive than a smartphone, are highly portable, and have a simpler user interface, providing an excellent medium for continuous data collection and enabling a higher compliance rate. A focus group session was conducted to explore the perception of participants towards smartwatch technology and its utility for PRO assessment. Participants included older adults (age > 65), with uniliateral or bilateral symptomatic knee Osteoaethritis (OA). A preliminary user interface with server communication capability was developed and deployed on 10 Samsung Gear S3 smartwatches and provided to the users during the focus group. Pain was designated as the main PRO, while fatigue, mood, and sleep quality were included as auxiliary PROs. Pre-planned topics included participants’ attitude towards the smartwatch technology, usability of the custom-designed app interface, and suitability of the smartwatch technology for PRO assessment. Discussions were transcribed and content analysis with theme characterization was performed to identify and code the major themes.

Open Review of our paper on JMIR journal can be found at this Link.