Shoulder pain is a disabling condition that is present in around 15% of Irish adults and known to cause reduced quality of life and limitation in work, sport and daily activities. The most appropriate treatment for shoulder pain is physiotherapy, in the form of a structured exercise programme. While exercise provides improvement in pain and disability levels, many patients don’t get the best outcomes with treatment. A key factor in the success of any exercise programme is adherence in terms of dose of the exercises, and quality- actually doing the exercises as prescribed. Many researchers have shown that adherence to physiotherapy exercise programmes are poor, and may explain the suboptimal results for many patients. A newly developed device, the Bandcizer, is a small portable gyroscope that can be clipped to the elastic resistance band that the patient is using for exercise. It monitors the amount and quality of exercise being completed and can also be used with an App giving real-time feedback to the patient as they do their exercises. As a very novel device, it has not yet been tested in a clinical shoulder pain setting. This project will undertake a feasibility study of the use of this device with patients undergoing shoulder physiotherapy. Data will be collected in the form of exercise quality and dosage completed, and a questionnaire asking patients’ what they thought of the device and App. This information will be used to design a clinical trial examining the role of exercise dose in treatment outcome.
