PainChek is an app developed by an Australian start-up that uses facial analysis technology and artificial intelligence to assess and measure pain.
It is a tool designed to help those who have difficulty expressing themselves or are unable to communicate their suffering such as people with dementia.
The most needy are the elderly patients who have persistent and chronic pain. However, they cannot be effectively identified with the risk of being left without treatment or having inadequate pharmacological treatments or inappropriate.
PainChek can represent one more means for a more correct and timely assessment for healthcare professionals The application, downloadable on the smartphone from Apple and Google stores, is a medical device that has received regular approval from the authorities of European countries, as well as in Canada and Australia.
Its validity in pain measurement has also been documented in a study published in 2017 in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. According to data provided by the company, PainChek, introduced in August in the UK, achieves an accuracy of 90 percent having already performed assessments on over 60,000 subjects worldwide.
The app is from easy to use and just point the smartphone in front of a patient’s face to record a video from which the artificial intelligence systems will obtain information such as the movement of the facial muscles useful for analyzing and calculating, in the event of a finding, the associated degree of pain producing a score .
The results can then be stored by the software, allowing the observed subject to be monitored over time and the effects of medical treatment and drugs administered.
PainChek, which is part of a trend of increasing reliance on mobile apps for pain management, it is currently in use in 722 care facilities in multiple countries.