Digital Platform to Provide Health Data Feedback for Neurorehabilitation Patients: User-Centered Development and Proof-of-Concept Usability Study.

The patients were all people with multiple sclerosis at one rehabilitation centre, so the design preferences may not carry over to stroke, brain injury or other neurorehabilitation groups. The app was tested with made-up data in a prototype. Nobody used it with their own real results, so this study says nothing about whether it changes motivation, decisions or rehabilitation outcomes. The samples were very small and the ratings are medians with no statistical testing, so differences between concepts, and between patients and therapists, could easily be chance. There were no predefined inclusion or exclusion criteria, so who took part was left to the treating team's judgement. The open comments were coded by a single person, and the sessions were held in German with quotes translated for publication. Data from the conventional assessments has to be pulled out of the hospital information system by hand before it reaches the app, an extra step in an already busy workflow.

Funded by the Swiss Multiple Sclerosis Society, the Swiss National Science Foundation as partner of the European Joint Programme on Rare Diseases, and the National Research Foundation Singapore. The authors state the funders played no role in study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation or writing, and declare no conflicts of interest.

Do not read the high usability scores as evidence that this app improves rehabilitation. The prototype ran on fabricated data with no comparison group, and no patient outcome was measured. The study shows the design is usable and acceptable to the people who tested it, not that feedback changes therapy results.