Abstract
Valid assessment of pain is essential in daily clinical practice to enhance the quality of care for the patients and to avoid the risk of addiction to strong analgesics. The aim of this paper is to find a method for objective and quantitative evaluation of pain using multiple physiological markers. Data was obtained from healthy volunteers exposed to thermal and ischemic stimuli. Twelve subjects were recruited and their physiological data including skin conductance, heart rate, and skin temperature were collected via a wrist-worn sensor together with their self-reported pain on a visual analogue scale (VAS). Statistically significant differences (p < 0.01) were found between physiological scores obtained with the wearable sensor before and during the thermal test. Test-retest reliability of sensor-based measures was good during the thermal test with intraclass correlation coefficients ranging from 0.22 to 0.89. These results support the idea that a multi-sensor wearable device can objectively measure physiological reactions in the subjects due to experimentally induced pain, which could be used for daily clinical practice and as an endpoint in clinical studies. Nevertheless, the results indicate a need for further investigation of the method in real-life pain settings.
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Acknowledgment
The study has been supported by the Swedish Agency for Innovation (VINNOVA) under the project “Controlled treatment of opiate-requiring pain using biosensors - SENSOP” in collaboration between the Multidisciplinary Pain Centre and Rehabilitation Medicine at Uppsala University Hospital, Sensidose AB, and Örebro University.
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Memedi, M. et al. (2022). Sensor-Based Measurement of Nociceptive Pain: An Exploratory Study with Healthy Subjects. In: Lewy, H., Barkan, R. (eds) Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare. PH 2021. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 431. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99194-4_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99194-4_7
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