Disclosures: Ivy Ren, BS: No financial relationships or conflicts of interest

Background and/or Objectives: The rise in digital health offers potential for monitoring and improving our understanding of chronic pain, and thus setting the foundation for better clinical management. This study’s objective was to analyze chronic pain over time and identify factors associated with increased pain.

Design: A retrospective cross-sectional study was done using de-identified data collected from Branch, a mobile chronic pain tracking app.

Setting: Users had the option of logging pain scores along with moods, pain characteristics, lifestyle descriptors, and demographics.

Participants: 319 participants logged data over a span of more than 6 months.

Interventions: There were no additional interventions besides usage of the application.

Main Outcome Measures: Analysis focused on pain scores, which were integers ranging from 1 to 10, as well as pain descriptors and factors associated with variations in pain.

Results: Pain scores had a mean of 5.77 ± 2.01, median of 6, and mode of 6. Increased tracking, whether determined by length of time using the application or number of overall posts, was not associated with pain score improvement. Participants’ posts where they endorsed “hopeful” (p=.008) and “calm” (p

Conclusions: mHealth can provide insight into subjective pain at various time points and should be further investigated to elicit correlated factors that can guide treatment.

Level of Evidence: Level IV

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PM&R Meeting Abstracts - https://pmrjabstracts.org/abstract/mobile-health-tracking-of-chronic-pain-a-retrospective-analysis/