An app that measures pain could help people with dementia

"When you're in pain, you can usually tell someone about it. But for people with communication difficulties, that isn't always an option, meaning pain often goes undetected, misinterpreted or wrongly treated.

To give a voice to those who can't report their suffering, such as people with dementia, PainChek, an Australian startup, has developed an app that uses facial analysis and artificial intelligence (AI) to assess and score pain levels.
A carer records a short video of the subject's face using a smartphone and answers questions about their behavior, movements and speech. The app's AI recognizes facial muscle movements that are associated with pain and combines this with the carer's observations to calculate an overall pain score.
According to the company, PainChek can detect pain with over 90% accuracy and more than 180,000 pain assessments have been completed worldwide on over 66,000 people. The app was designed for use with elderly people needing care.
Determining pain levels
Typically, assessing pain in dementia patients with severe communication impairment involves carers and healthcare professionals observing their facial expressions and behavior, and interpreting the results according to a standardized scale, such as the Abbey Pain Scale..." Lire la suite