Recording of Time-Varying Back-Pain Data: A Wireless Solution

Abstract

Chronic back pain is a debilitating experience for a considerable proportion of the adult population, with a significant impact on countries' economies and health systems. While there has been increasing anecdotal evidence to support the fact that for certain categories of patients (such as wheelchair users), the back pain experienced is dynamically varying with time, there is a relative scarcity of data to support and document this observation, with consequential impact upon such patients' treatment and care. Part of the reason behind this state of affairs is the relative difficulty in gathering pain measurements at precisely defined moments in time. In this paper, we describe a wireless-enabled solution that collects both questionnaire and diagrammatic, visual-based data, via a pain drawing, which overcomes such limitations, enabling seamless data collection and its upload to a hospital server using existing wireless fidelity technology. Results show that it is generally perceived to be an easy-to-use and convenient solution to the challenges of anywhere/anytime data collection.

An interactive 3-D application for pain management: Results from a pilot study in spinal cord injury rehabilitation

“…Nonetheless, despite their widely reported usefulness [10,11,12,14,15,16,17], there seems to be a lack of consensus regarding the applicability of such instruments in managing pain for persons with SCI. For example, asking an individual with SCI a question about pain interference with walking, a common question in many quality of life measures, is not applicable for someone who uses a wheelchair every day [18].…”

“…The developed system was designed and implemented by extending previous work by [17,30] and according to the user requirements identified. It consists of the underlying system architecture shown in Figure 3, with the three main components being the developed application with the Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) Engine for 3-D support, the web/database server, and the backend databases.…”

“…It has to be noted that, with regards to the 3-D functionality, the data that are saved are not pictorial, but mainly numerical/textual (location of pain--each body region had a unique text identifier, type of pain -each type had an Red Green Blue (RGB) numerical value, posture, selected mannequin body division, and time of day). As such, database sizes are kept relatively small [17] and can, therefore, be more efficiently used e.g. in uploading the information over the Internet.…”

PainDroid: an android-based virtual reality application for pain assessment

“…Thus, patients are unable to visually express the pain that they are experiencing, as statements of the form "I have a pain on the inside of my thigh" are not easily captured in a 2-D pain drawing, and the accuracy of the reported information can be often questioned. This has been also confirmed by a number of clinicians involved in a study by Serif and Ghinea [9], who evaluated an electronic version of the 2-D pain drawing, with their results suggesting that a 3-D human model would be more beneficial for the intended purpose than the traditional 2-D representation.…”

“…As such, further to our previous work towards this effort [8][9][10]13], several similar studies have been carried out that attempted to automate and improve the traditional pain assessment techniques. Such a study is the one by Jacob et al [14], where they examined the usability of smartphone applications by children with Sickle Cell Disease for reporting their pain symptoms.…”