Towards Chatbot-Supported Self-Reporting for Increased Reliability and Richness of Ground Truth for Automatic Pain Recognition: Reflections on Long-Distance Runners and People with Chronic Pain

Abstract

Pain is a ubiquitous and multifaceted experience, making the gathering of ground truth for training machine learning system particularly difficult. In this paper, we reflect on the use of voice-based Experience Sampling Method (ESM) approaches for collecting pain self-reports in two different real-life case studies: long-distance runners, and people living with chronic pain performing housework activities. We report on the reflections emerging from these two qualitative studies in which semi-structured interviews were used to exploratively gather initial insights on how voice-based ESM could affect the collection of self-reports as ground truth.While frequent ESM questions may be considered intrusive, most of our participants found them useful, and even welcomed those question prompts. Particularly, they found that such voice-based questions facilitated in-the-moment self-reflection, and stimulated a sense of companionship leading to richer self-reporting, and possibly more reliable ground truth. We will discuss the ways in which participants benefitted from subjective self-reporting leading to an increased awareness and self-understanding. In addition, we make the case for the possibility of building a chatbot with ESM capabilities in order to gather more enhanced, refined but structured ground truth that combines pain ratings and their qualification. Such rich ground truth can provide could be seen as more reliable, as well as contributing to more refined machine learning models able to better capture the complexity of pain experience. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing • Human computer interaction (HCI) • Empirical studies in HCI

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“…In order to limit disruption of the activities, the verbal prompt was shortened to "time" once the self-report constructs and procedure were extensively described to the participant. The method and frequency of selfreport was based on discussion in [39] of the value of the method for both research and the participants themselves.…”