Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience usually arising from actual or potential tissue damage. Pain, especially the acute and nociceptive type, is perceived from pain receptors in the body and is interpreted by the brain, which could be affected by multiple factors such as emotional state, memories of previous pain, and culture. Due to this reason, pain is considered to be subjective and has been believed as “whatever the person experiencing it says it is”. However, not everyone can report their pain. Self-report fails in cases where people cannot communicate by any means, for example, critically ill patients and people with limited cognitive ability. Therefore, in this condition, caregivers have to speculate the pain empirically from the patient’s behaviors and the vital sign change. This project aims at automating this empirical procedure by leveraging sensing technology, Internet-of-things technology, as well as health data analytics.

Project – Personalized pain assessment system based on IoT (PASI) is funded by the Academy of Finland from January 1st, 2018 to December 30th, 2019, and is a continuation of our previous Academy of Finland project, Smart pain assessment based on IoT (SPA). As a cutting-edge application and interdisciplinary research, the project connects partners from Nursing Science researchers, the University Hospital at the University of Turku, Finland, and the University of California, Irvine, U.S., with close cooperation.