Website: https://PainStory.science

The problem. Chronic pain, generally classified as pain that persists past normal healing time and lasts for longer than 3 to 6 months, affects almost 2.5 billion people, and is the main cause of the opioid crisis.1 Costs for treating and managing chronic pain conditions are greater than that for heart disease, cancer, and diabetes combined.2

While these facts are alarming, they paint an impersonal picture of the condition, detached from the actual daily suffering experienced by patients. As Kurt Tucholsky once said, “a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic”, reflecting our protective tendency to simplify a harmful reality.

A critical challenge in pain management emerges from the fact that pain cannot be directly measured. Therefore, currently, the assessment of pain is based on a single 0-10 scale articulated by the patient with significant limitations especially for long-term usage: (1) being subjective and repetitive, it is biased and not sensitive enough, resulting in an unrealistic burden on the patient; (2) this oversimplified pain estimation does not capture the multiple aspects of chronic pain, such as its emotional and social impacts; and (3) shows low consistency with patients’ judgment about the severity of ongoing pain and its effects on daily life.3 As result, this easy-to-use approach to pain assessment means clinicians don’t have an accurate measurement tool for diagnosis or an evaluation of treatment efficacy. Therefore, objective measures of pain are needed to better inform pain management.

Our goals:

1. To develop an accurate objective pain assessment for clinical pain monitoring.
2.  To reduce the stigma associated with chronic pain conditions and to increase awareness about chronic pain.

Our approach. We are developing a completely novel and intuitive digital platform, PainStory.science, that allows us to collect audio/video recordings from pain patients sharing their experiences of living with chronic pain. PainStory is a self-serving digital platform that uses advanced cybersecurity protocols to ensure participants’ privacy. The patients will be asked to describe their current symptoms, related emotions and suffering, the causes of the pain, and what makes the pain better or worse – by talking into their smartphone’s camera and microphone at home or in in their normal environment. In addition, they will rate their pain levels and complete a series of psychosocial surveys.

Using advanced machine learning approaches, the PainStory platform will “listen” and analyse patients’ narrative content, their vocal nuances and associated facial expressions to develop a personalised pain assessment. The PainStory assessment will be used for better clinical evaluation, and digital follow-up between the clinical visits. Relying on cheap and available sensing technology (microphone and camera), our solution will be easily scalable and adoptable. A select number of the pain narratives will be shared publicly (with patients’ approval) to empower others suffering from chronic pain.