AI helps assess pain levels in people with sickle cell disease

AI algorithms can assess the pain that someone with sickle cell disease is experiencing by using just their vital signs. Doing so could ensure people receive the most suitable pain management therapy for their condition. "There's always a trade-off between giving people sufficient medicine to reduce the pain and giving people too much medication so that they have bad side effects or a higher risk of addiction," says Daniel Abrams at Northwestern University in Illinois. But since pain is subjective, it is difficult to measure in a standardised way. Abrams and his colleagues set out to determine whether physiological data that is already routinely taken – including body temperature, heart rate and blood pressure – could be used to devise a system that assesses pain levels in a more objective manner.