Usage Patterns of an mHealth Symptom Monitoring App Among Adolescents With Acute Mild Traumatic Brain Injuries.

The sample was small and not very varied: 23 of 35 participants self-identified as white, and a single children's hospital recruited everyone. The paper also reports demographics for 35 people although it says 19 boys and 17 girls were assigned, so the numbers do not quite line up. Participants needed their own device and internet access, so teens with fewer resources may never have been in the study. Recruitment was stopped for three months by COVID-19 and restarted, and the authors say the effect of that disruption on app use cannot be determined. The feedback only looked at whether symptoms had changed, not at how bad they were, so a teen who had largely recovered could be told they were not improving. The digital symptom scale used icons and sliders and was never checked against the standard text version. Only the app group was studied, so nothing here compares using the app with not using it, and no recovery outcome is compared between groups. The researchers' check of whether teens acted on the feedback was based on 218 opportunities within a group where use varied widely, and they note the feedback may have been less relevant when the app was not used daily.

The text supplied contains no funding or conflict-of-interest statement, so who paid for the work and what the authors declared is not known from this paper.

Do not read this as evidence the app speeds up concussion recovery or that it works as a treatment. It reports only how often the app was used, in one arm of a pilot trial, with no comparison group and no recovery outcome compared between groups.