The accuracy and reliability of the ePAED versus traditional clinical tools for the measurement of plagiocephaly

The incidence of deformational plagiocephaly has dramatically increased over recent years throughout Australia. To evaluate outcomes of various methods of intervention, measurement of skull asymmetry needs to be accurate and reliable. The aim of this study was to compare two traditional measurement tools, the tapemeasure and the flexicurve, to an electronic portable anthropometric evaluation device, ‘ePAED’. First a laboratory study was performed to determine the ePAED’s accuracy and reliability compared to traditional tools when measuring diagonal dimensions of three ellipses of known proportions. Next, the clinical reliability of the ePAED was compared to the traditional tools in a study involving measurement of the cranial vault asymmetry index of twenty-five infants’ heads, aged between 12 and 48 weeks. To gain a wide range of asymmetry severity, infants were recruited from the community and a Tertiary Plagiocephaly Clinic.