Pain and Stress Detection Using Wearable Sensors and Devices—A Review

Abstract

Pain is a subjective feeling; it is a sensation that every human being must have experienced all their life. Yet, its mechanism and the way to immune to it is still a question to be answered. This review presents the mechanism and correlation of pain and stress, their assessment and detection approach with medical devices and wearable sensors. Various physiological signals (i.e., heart activity, brain activity, muscle activity, electrodermal activity, respiratory, blood volume pulse, skin temperature) and behavioral signals are organized for wearables sensors detection. By reviewing the wearable sensors used in the healthcare domain, we hope to find a way for wearable healthcare-monitoring system to be applied on pain and stress detection. Since pain leads to multiple consequences or symptoms such as muscle tension and depression that are stress related, there is a chance to find a new approach for chronic pain detection using daily life sensors or devices. Then by integrating modern computing techniques, there is a chance to handle pain and stress management issue.

Smart Devices and Wearable Technologies to Detect and Monitor Mental Health Conditions and Stress: A Systematic Review

“…In one systematic review, it was found that electrodermal activity is useful in measuring neurocognitive stress, as skin conductance increases when individuals are stressed [ 52 ], which reported a wearable not identified with the above search terms. The “shimmer sensor” is a monitoring wearable sensor which uses EDA for stress monitoring, using two finger sensors, capable in one reported study of detecting stress in 86% of subjects; however, HRV and EEG data were also used in detection [ 52 ]. An additional study was also found outside of the search criteria which measured EDA to determine the level of pre-surgery stress, using the wrist wearable ADI-VSM (Analog Devices), with an accuracy of 85% [ 53 ].…”

“…Adjunctive EEG increases the accuracy of stress detection [ 12 ]; however, future studies need to assess the applicability of dual devices for long-term monitoring of chronic stress. EDA was considered a useful metric for detecting stress, reported by one author to be the preferred wearable due to simplicity and setup [ 19 ]; however, another author expressed some unreliability in results from EDA measurement through wearable devices due to motion artefact [ 52 ]. Detection of depression using wearable devices is an ongoing challenge, with wearable EEG [ 5 , 15 ] and accelerometers [ 21 , 29 ] currently used for detection, with the prior capable of detecting depression alone, whilst physical activity in a machine learning model can accurately detect depression.…”

The Concept of Advanced Multi-Sensor Monitoring of Human Stress

“…Stress have impact to the peripheral and body core temperature. While peripheral distal skin temperature has tendency of decreasing, core temperature increases [ 142 , 150 ]. During chronic stress, even the fever can be developed [ 151 ].…”

“…The current literature summary of stress assessment using wearable multi-sensors in the natural environment includes: emotion recognition by neural networks from portable eyetracker and Empatica E4 [ 212 ], ANS research using again E4 but now with ECG and respiration sensors [ 213 ], development of cognitive load tracker using machine learning [ 109 ], smart stress reduction system using E4 combined with accelerometers [ 214 ], validation of wireless sensors for psychophysiological studies and stress detection [ 100 , 215 ], prediction of relative physical activity [ 216 ], real-time monitoring of passenger psychological stress [ 147 ], classification of calm/distress condition [ 217 ], assessment of mental stress of fighters [ 218 ], and others. A comprehensive overview about pain and stress detection using available wearable sensors was actually made very recently by Jerry Chen et al [ 150 ]. They mention, stress monitoring using mobile EEG head set MindWave [ 219 ], ECG and EMG DataLOG [ 220 ], using a combination of MindWave EEG (NeuroSky, San Jose, CA, USA), Zephyr BioHarness 3 chest belt (Medtronic, Boulder, CO, USA), Shimmer Sensor (Shimmer Sensing, Dublin, Ireland) [ 221 ] and mobile sensors suite AutoSense (National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA) [ 222 ].…”

Digital therapeutics in pain medicine

“…A recent study in Korean fibromyalgia patients evaluated the effects of a real-time pain monitoring system using a wearable device [ 9 ]. In particular, rapid advances in wearable device technology will accelerate its implementation [ 10 ]. Real-time pain data can be continuously monitored using wearable devices and transferred to wirelessly connected databases [ 10 ].…”