PainSense: Pain Assessment through Reality Sensing

We propose a pervasive computing framework which can support diagnosis of psychosocial factors related to diseases and disorders in the elderly population. An Internetenabled health-kiosk system or mobile device lessens the barriers for the elder to record their psychosocial diary and produces long-term monitoring data for physicians. Daily conversation between elders and family members over mobile phone can be utilized as a natural way to characterize and analyze the elder’s pain or mood. The PainSense framework monitors and analyzes pain behavior such as sensory perception, affective cues, and physiological pain behavior. Users self-report their pain experience via touchscreen-based kiosk or a Nokia N95 mobile phone. PainSense also provides a historical data visualization interface for physicians. Future work will explore potential reinforcing indicators of pain conditions through behavior mining and will exploit unobtrusive and inexpensive sensor technologies to improve pain management.