Use of Wearable Sensor Device and Mobile Application for Objective Assessment of Pain in Post-surgical Patients: A Preliminary Study

Effective post-operative pain management requires an accurate and frequent assessment of the pain experienced by the patients. The current gold-standard of pain assessment is through patient self-evaluation (e.g., numeric rating scale, NRS) which is subjective, prone to recall-bias, and does not provide comprehensive information of the pain intensity and its trends. We conducted a study to explore the potential of wearable biosensors and machine learning-based analysis of physiological parameters to estimate the pain intensity. The results from our study of post-operative knee surgery patients monitored over a period of 30 days demonstrate the feasibility of the system in ambulatory setting, with a substantial agreement (Cohen's Kappa = 0.70, 95% CI 0.68-0.72) between the pain intensity estimation and the patient reported numerical rating scale. Therefore, the wearable biosensors coupled with the machine learning-derived pain estimation are capable of remotely assessing the pain intensity.