Investigating Agreement and Reliability of Mobile Health App for Continuous Walking on a Figure-Eight Path With Periodic Vision Interruptions

Smartphone applications already provide accessible and cost-effective objective metrics in healthcare. The purpose of this study was to assess the agreement and reliability of an app to a manual stopwatch during a figure-of-eight walking course both with and without visual perturbation. A laboratory-based observation study with twelve healthy adults completed the course under two different visual conditions, one without visual obstruction and the other with visual disruption induced by wearing stroboscopic glasses. Results indicate that each measurement metric is similar but should not be used interchangeably. Bland-Altman plots suggest reliability under each condition. The ICC of each device during both conditions suggest excellent reliability: no visual obstruction (0.988) and with stroboscopic glasses (0.986). Understanding how healthy individuals perform and respond during multiple positional changes under different visual conditions when using a smartphone app is imperative for the clinical translation of this technology. The integration of smartphone apps has the potential to reduce healthcare provider errors and provide more reliable data for modern medical records.