Designing, Fabricating, and Testing the Validity and Reliability of the Digital Headband for Cervical Proprioception Assessment: A Descriptive Study

Accuracy of proprioceptive input plays an important role in cervical motor control. Several methods have been used to evaluate the accuracy of proprioceptive input as a factor of cervical injury prevention or rehabilitation. The aim of this study was to introduce a new tool for evaluating the accuracy of cervical proprioception and determine its validity and reliability.

In this descriptive study, 40 men aged 18-60 years were selected as subjects based on inclusion and exclusion criteria, and their cervical repositioning errors were evaluated by using Digital Headband and Cervical Range of Motion (CROM) device as a gold standard in measuring cervical angles. After collecting the required information, Pearson’s correlation coefficient and intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) were used in order to determine the validity and intra-rater and inter-rater reliability, respectively.

The results showed that Digital Headband has a very high validity (r: 0.84-0.89) and great intra-rater and inter-rater reliability (ICC: 0.89-0.94 and ICC: 0.87-0.93, respectively) for assessing the accuracy of cervical proprioception (p<0.05).

Digital Headband as an accurate, cost-effective, and easy-to-use tool, providing cervical proprioceptive information in the shortest time, can be a good alternative to other methods of cervical proprioception assessment.