Chronic pain patients show abnormal and maladaptive response to life stressors, resulting in depression, anxiety, fatigue, and a reduction in positive emotion.  These changes, in turn, amplify pain, creating a vicious cycle of increasing disability. Early detection of dysregulated emotion patterns and their dysregulation over time is a key to treating mental illness and chronic pain while they are still reversible. Currently, clinical visits are too brief to allow adequate assessment, and evidence-based tools to analyze trajectories of emotion, pain, and fatigue are unavailable to clinicians.

We are developing a unique mobile platform that 1) allows patients to record and track interactions between pain, emotion, and bodily  experiences; 2) delivers information about these experiences to clinicians in order to personalize prevention and treatment; 3) provides insurance companies with feedback about the status and health trajectories of patient populations. The application allows patients to report their experiences in an effortless and engaging way, and also captures patterns of speech and facial expressions, which deliver a readout of patients’ emotional and pain behaviors. The application will be used by patients for self-monitoring and self-insight and will deliver interactive graphics to patients, clinicians, and insurance companies, providing an easy-to-digest picture of emotional health and pain over time.