Measuring Assistive Devices Management in Spinal Cord Injury

This chapter aims to describe and evaluate the assessment tools for evaluating assistive devices management in people with SCI through a systematic review of scientific literature. The systematic review was conducted in line with COnsensus-based Standards for the selection of health Measurement Instruments (COSMIN) on Pubmed, Scopus, CINAHL, and Web of Science. After removing duplicates, 3333 papers were screened. Of these, 476 were included in this systematic review. Among these, 37 papers were considered for this chapter. Results show 22 assessment tools that evaluate the assistive devices management area in persons with SCI. Among these, most scales evaluate the aspect of self-efficacy, mobility, and skill, and they are mainly performance tests. The most common assessment tools identified include the Wheelchair Circuit to assess manual wheelchair mobility; the Wheelchair Skills Test (WST) offering 33 skills spanning the spectrum from skills as easy as applying the brakes to skills as difficult as performing a wheelie; and the Wheelchair use Confidence Scale (WheelCon), a measurement scale that assesses self-efficacy with conceptual use of a manual wheelchair to measure physical environment, knowledge, and problem-solving, and advocacy.