An App That Measures Pain Could Help People With Dementia

CNN Business reports that Australian startup PainChek has designed an application that analyzes faces to assess and score pain levels, which could help people with dementia. "It's very difficult for humans to decode the emotions of the person's face," said PainChek's Business Development Director Peter Shergill. "So the tool applies artificial intelligence and algorithms to decode the face based on decades of research." A caregiver records a short video of a person's face using a smartphone, and answers questions about their behavior, movements, and speech. The app identifies facial muscle movements associated with pain, and integrates this with the caregiver's observations to calculate a pain score. PainChek claims the app detects pain with more than 90 percent accuracy, and more than 180,000 pain evaluations have been conducted worldwide on over 66,000 people. PainChek was engineered for use with seniors needing care, and a 2017 validation study in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease found the app provided reliable evidence of pain. U.K.-based residential home owner Paul Rowley said "people with dementia have difficulty communicating and they can't necessarily articulate what they are feeling, so that often leaves the carer having to interpret their feelings," adding that PainChek helps caregivers quickly determine whether somebody is in pain.