Sensor Technologies to Manage the Physiological Traits of Chronic Pain: A Review

Abstract

Non-oncologic chronic pain is a common high-morbidity impairment worldwide and acknowledged as a condition with significant incidence on quality of life. Pain intensity is largely perceived as a subjective experience, what makes challenging its objective measurement. However, the physiological traces of pain make possible its correlation with vital signs, such as heart rate variability, skin conductance, electromyogram, etc., or health performance metrics derived from daily activity monitoring or facial expressions, which can be acquired with diverse sensor technologies and multisensory approaches. As the assessment and management of pain are essential issues for a wide range of clinical disorders and treatments, this paper reviews different sensor-based approaches applied to the objective evaluation of non-oncological chronic pain. The space of available technologies and resources aimed at pain assessment represent a diversified set of alternatives that can be exploited to address the multidimensional nature of pain.

Virtual Reality for Pain Management to Tackle the Opioid Crisis

“…Many of the limitations observed in these studies can be overcome by increasing patient sizes in RCTs, standardization of the intervention protocols, and moving from subjective to objective pain and immersion measurements. For example, studies have shown that biophysical parameter measurements, such as heart rate variability (HRV) and skin conductance using sensor-based pain monitoring technologies, can help measure pain objectively (Naranjo-Hernández et al, 2020). Though research on the immersion process is still in its infancy, the degree of immersion has been found to be a critical factor in improving the target patient engagement (Servotte et al, 2020).…”

Exploration of physiological sensors, features, and machine learning models for pain intensity estimation

“…Most of them have only focused on pain recognition, which means that they just indicated statistical significance correlations between individual physiological signals and pain to recognize the presence or absence of pain, without quantifying the pain intensity. Naranjo-Hernández et al [ 21 ] provided a detailed review of different sensors that have been proposed for objective evaluation of chronic pain.…”

Special Issue “Body Sensors Networks for E-Health Applications”

“…Finally, some works have carried out reviews of sensor technologies compatible with BSN. In this sense, the authors of Reference [ 8 ] carry out a detailed review of the different technologies that have been proposed for the objective evaluation of chronic pain, which is prevalent in multiple pathologies. The chronic pain condition is directly related to the patient’s well-being, and also to the psychological state (anxiety, depression, etc.).…”

“…Objective pain assessment is challenging for researchers, and different approaches for pain measurement based on biomedical sensors have been proposed, although to date there is no universal method for the objective pain assessment. The referenced work [ 8 ] reviews and comparatively analyzes the different methods described in the literature focusing on chronic non-cancer pain. One of the variables employed in the studies is the heart rate variability (HRV), since pain influences the balance of the autonomic nervous system (ANS), detectable through the analysis of HRV.…”