Supporting the Self-Management of Chronic Pain Conditions with Tailored Momentary Self-Assessments

Abstract

To better support the self-management of chronic pain, this paper investigates how those living with the condition prefer to self-assess their pain levels using smartphones. Our work consists of three stages: design ideation and review, an in-lab user study with 10 participants resulting in nine candidate interfaces, and a 3 week field trial of two further honed measures with 12 participants. This research firstly yields a better understanding of participants’ strong and sometimes contrasting preferences regarding their self-assessment of pain intensity. We additionally contribute two novel interfaces that support accurate, quick, and repeated use along with other participant-valued interactions (e.g., familiar, relatable, and highly usable). In particular, we focus on designing tailored measures that both enhance respondent motivation as well as minimize the difficulty of meaningful self-assessment by supporting the cog-nitive effort in translating a subjective experience into a single numerical value.

Flexible and Mindful Self-Tracking

“…Microsoft Excel was used for analysing photos, and comments were analysed in NVivo. Firstly, we used the search box on Instagram's public website entering the hashtag #bulletjournal which led to 1,063,790 posts 1 . The first 100 most recent posts were manually included in an Excel sheet, grouped and analysed according to visual similarities and differences.…”

“…Prior research has examined the use of organic representations to encourage physical activity [42], explored a range of design alternatives to support tailored momentary self-assessments of chronic pain [1], and empowered individuals to bridge automated and manually tracked data streams [36]. We have presented paper bullet journaling as a mindful design practice and illustrated that manual self-tracking is not necessarily a "burden" that needs to be overcome with automated capture.…”

Feel My Pain

“…This paper extends previous HCI research on the use of mobile technologies to enable pain logging [1,3,39] by considering the practical and social challenges of enabling self-logging by hospital inpatients. Our specific contributions include:…”

“…Recent efforts in HCI have focused on supporting self-logging of pain with lightweight, easy-to-use interfaces (e.g. [1]) but these studies aimed to develop tools that allow patients to self-score their pain away from the hospital. Designing for use in the hospital context brings its own technical and social challenges.…”

“…Pain has been characterised as a subjective experience consisting of two dimensions: intensity and disruptiveness [1]. The former refers to the severity of perceived pain, whereas the latter refers to the way in which pain disrupts an individual's emotional, physical and social wellbeing.…”