Patient user interfaces for determining pain level through everyday smartphone tasks and wearable physiological signal sensors

Abstract

Tracking patients’ pain is a critical issue for clinical caregivers, particularly among staff responsible for providing analgesic relief. However, collecting regularly scheduled pain measurements from patients can be cumbersome and time-consuming for clinicians. Additionally, Opiophobia among patients and physician is a well-documented barrier for effective pain management. With the ever-growing popularity of smartphones, physiological wearable sensors and their potential effectiveness for medical assessment and diagnostic, we created Pain Sense: a mobile application that measure how pain affects a person’s motor coordination, cognition, and physiological markers using performance metrics and sensor data. We developed and evaluated the usability and acceptability of a smartphone app to support objective pain intensity measure to permit effective pain management and relief. We employed iterative process for app development and testing. Patient and clinicians participated in alpha testing of the final prototype to assess usability and acceptability. The current Pain Sense app include the following user interfaces to assess situational impairment: Typing UI, Swiping UI, Balancing UI, Reaction UI and Choice UI. We ran randomized controlled trial to validate the effectiveness of human performance metrics and features derived from mobile embedded sensors and physiological sensing technologies in developing an objective metric for pain intensity assessment. © 2022 International Conference on Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction

Keywords Pain Reporting Tasks, Pain Sense Mobile Application, Perceived Pain Intensity, Physiological Markers, Physiological Signals