Measuring Activity of Daily Living in Spinal Cord Injury

This chapter aims to describe and evaluate the assessment tools for evaluating activities of daily living (ADL) 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, 115 papers were considered for this chapter. Results show 48 assessment tools that evaluate the ADL area in persons with SCI. Among these, most scales evaluate the aspect of independence, participation, and environmental factors. The most common assessment tools are the functional independence measure (FIM) which is a multidimensional instrument that evaluates the performance in the motor and cognitive/social domains, and the spinal cord independence measure III (SCIM-III), which is specifically for patients with SCI in order to make the functional assessments including self-care, respiration, sphincter management, and mobility areas of function.