AI is changing how we quantify pain

Artificial intelligence is helping health-care providers better assess their patients' discomfort. For years at Orchard Care Homes, a 23 facility dementia-care chain in northern England, Cheryl Baird watched nurses fill out the Abbey Pain Scale, an observational methodology used to evaluate pain in those who can't communicate verbally. Baird, a former nurse who was then the facility's director of quality, describes it as "a tick box exercise where people weren't truly considering pain indicators." As a result, agitated residents were assumed to have behavioral issues, since the scale does not always differentiate well between pain and other forms of suffering or distress. They were often prescribed psychotropic sedatives, while the pain itself went untreated. Then, in January 2021, Orchard Care Homes began a trial of PainChek, a smartphone app that scans a resident's face for microscopic muscle movements and uses artificial intelligence to output an expected pain score.