Quality of Life Measurements in Spinal Cord Injury Patients.

We recently developed UceWeb, an application for direct elicitation of utility coefficients (UCs), i.e. a measure of health states quality perceived by patients. UceWeb was used to interview a sample of patients affected by spinal cord injury (SCI). A standard questionnaire for measuring quality of life (QoL) and another one for the system evaluation were also administered to the same patients. The aims of this work are to (i) evaluate UceWeb usability; (ii) investigate relationships among QoL values elicited with different methods, (iii) create a reference set of UCs for the health states experienced by SCI patients. We show preliminary results obtained with the first 20 patients. Despite great variability found among QoL values elicited with the different methods, interesting correlations with patients' condition and profile have been found.