Computer knows how much pain you are in by studying your face

A new system that rates how much pain someone is in just by looking at their face could help doctors decide how to treat patients. By examining tiny facial expressions and calibrating the system to each person, it provides a level of objectivity in an area where that's normally hard to come by. "These metrics might be useful in determining real pain from faked pain," says Jeffrey Cohn at the University of Pittsburgh in the US. The system could make the difference between prescribing potentially addictive painkillers and catching out a faker. Objectively measuring pain levels is a tricky task, says Dianbo Liu, who created the system with his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. People experience and express pain differently, so a doctor's estimate of a patient's pain can often differ from a self-reported pain score.