The Walking Impairment Questionnaire (WIQ) is a disease-specific instrument used to assess walking ability through a questionnaire. It is often used as an alternative to treadmill testing and is commonly used in studies involving patients with Peripheral Artery Disease (PAD) and/or intermittent claudication.
Harmony can play a crucial role in the validation and harmonisation of the WIQ with other instruments. As mentioned before, validation is the process of determining the degree to which an instrument accurately measures what it is intended to measure. In the case of the WIQ, this means assessing whether it accurately measures walking ability in patients with PAD and/or intermittent claudication.
Harmony can help with this by comparing the items in the WIQ with items in other instruments commonly used to measure walking ability, such as the 6-minute walk test or the Timed Up and Go test. By using its large language models, Harmony can identify the level of match between the WIQ items and the items in these other instruments. This can provide valuable information on the validity of the WIQ and its ability to accurately measure walking ability.
Additionally, researchers may want to harmonise the WIQ with other instruments, meaning they want to establish crosswalks between items in the WIQ and items in other instruments. This can be important for comparing results across studies that use different instruments. Harmony’s ability to compare items in multiple languages makes it a valuable tool for harmonisation, especially in studies involving participants from different countries.
In summary, Harmony can aid researchers in the validation and harmonisation of the Walking Impairment Questionaire by comparing its items with those in other instruments and establishing crosswalks. This can improve the overall quality and reliability of research involving the WIQ and contribute to a better understanding of walking ability in patients with PAD and/or intermittent claudication.
