Kaia Health, a digital therapeutics company, announced results from the first randomised controlled trial of its app-based therapy programme for patients with non-specific low back pain. Detailed results of the study were published in the journal NPJ Digital Medicine and showed that patients using Kaia, a downloadable app for back pain, reported significantly lower pain levels compared to the control group treated with physiotherapy and online education.
“This study can help add to the growing body of evidence that generally supports the use of multimodal treatments for chronic conditions,” said Thomas Tölle, Head of Pain Medicine, Technical University Munich, Germany. “Within this study, we saw a notable benefit for people managing low back pain when delivering multimodal treatment through the digital modality of the smartphone, as is done in the Kaia app.”
Low back pain is one of the leading causes of global disability, and treatment is expensive [1,2]. According to the Office for National Statistics, back, neck and muscle problems account for almost 31 million days of work lost in 2013, costing the UK economy £14 billion per year, with an estimated one-third of the UK adult po