Cross-cultural adaptation and concurrent validity of the children's OMNI scale of perceived exertion for Arm-Crank activity in Spina Bifida

Purpose: To perform a cross-cultural adaptation of the OMNI verbal descriptors to Brazilian-Portuguese and examine the validity of the Brazilian version for arm-crank activity.Materials and methods: Cross-cultural adaptation stages were: permission, translation, synthesis, back translation, expert committee review, pretesting, and submission and appraisal. For the concurrent validity, a Brazilian OMNI-Wheel scale was used to obtain rating of perceived exertion for the overall body (RPEOverall) and arms (RPEArms) in participants (n = 9, 10-17 years) with spina bifida. Cardiopulmonary exercise test was used to measure heart rate (HR) and oxygen uptake (VO2). Repeated Measures Correlation (r(rm)) was used to examine the scale validity.Results: The cross-cultural adaptation produced equivalence between English and Brazilian-Portuguese verbal descriptors based on successful translation and pretesting. The Brazilian OMNI-wheel was validated based on strong associations of RPEOverall with VO2 (r(rm) (35) = 0.86, 95% CI [0.93, 0.73], p < 0.001) and HR (r(rm) (35) = 0.89, 95% CI [0.94, 0.79], p < 0.001) and RPEArms with VO2 (r(rm) (33) = 0.82, 95% CI [0.91, 0.66], p < 0.001) and HR (r(rm) (33) = 0.82, 95% CI [0.91, 0.66], p < 0.001).Conclusions: The OMNI scale was cross-culturally adapted to Brazilian-Portuguese. The Brazilian OMNI-Wheel was validated based on strong associations of RPE with HR and VO2.