This app recognizes pain from your facial expression
Can you tell, just from looking at someone, whether they’re in pain?
For most of us, unless someone is obviously grimacing, we count on words over visual cues to tell us whether someone is in pain. However, this gets complicated when it comes to people who struggle to express themselves verbally—like many vulnerable older adults.
There’s an app for that: Facial recognition software from PainChek is being trialed across several U.K. care homes in Bedfordshire to help providers better recognize and manage pain.
- The PainChek app recognizes and flags pain based on facial expressions recorded using a smartphone camera.
- The app’s AI-enabled facial recognition works by tracking subtle facial muscle movements associated with pain.
- Providers use the app to help them decide whether or not to dispense pain medication, with the goal being to lower the unnecessary use of these drugs.
- The app also records and stores patients’ pain scores over time, making it easier to track how well pain intervention programs are working over time.
Importantly, the app also has an interface for storing self-reported pain scores from patients who are able to verbalize their pain, creating a one-stop shop for patient pain monitoring.
How it’s working: Here are some early results from Bedfordshire’s year-long pilot of PainChek.
- In the first three months, 39 users across six care homes conducted 152 assessments with the app, identifying 124 instances of pain.
- In just the first two months, pain medication usage fell by 55%.
- The app has since been rolled out to reach 1,000 residents across the area.
The future of facial monitoring: Care home pain management is one niche application of this technology, but we don’t see it stopping there.
- Readers may remember our recent coverage of emotion-sending smart glasses, a slightly more high-tech implementation of a similar idea: your subtle facial movements may be better indicators of how you’re feeling than your words.
- PainChek itself has also recently launched an infant-focused version of its app, allowing for more quantifiable tracking and reports of infant pain between pediatrician visits.
- However, we wouldn’t be surprised if the kind of concerns we hear about facial recognition software outside of medtech translate to this space as well. With air travel biometric scanner giant Clear setting its sights on a healthcare expansion, we’ll likely be hearing about the issue of privacy with respect to this technology more and more.