An app that measures pain could help people with dementia

London (CNN Business)When you're in pain, you can usually tell someone about it. But for people with communication difficulties, that isn't always an option, meaning pain often goes undetected, misinterpreted or wrongly treated. To give a voice to those who can't report their suffering, such as people with dementia, PainChek, an Australian startup, has developed an app that uses facial analysis and artificial intelligence (AI) to assess and score pain levels. A carer records a short video of the subject's face using a smartphone and answers questions about their behavior, movements and speech. The app's AI recognizes facial muscle movements that are associated with pain and combines this with the carer's observations to calculate an overall pain score.