Pain is a complex condition that affects a large portion of the population. Accurate and consistent evaluation is essential for individuals experiencing pain and supports the development of effective and advanced management strategies. Automatic pain assessment systems provide continuous monitoring, aid clinical decision-making, and aim to reduce distress while preventing functional decline. This study has been submitted to the Second Multimodal Sensing Grand Challenge for Next-Gen Pain Assessment (AI4PAIN). The proposed method introduces a pipeline that employs respiration as the input signal and integrates a highly efficient cross-attention transformer with a multi-windowing strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that respiration serves as a valuable physiological modality for pain assessment. Furthermore, results show that compact and efficient models, when properly optimized, can deliver strong performance, often surpassing larger counterparts. The proposed multi-window strategy effectively captures short-term and long-term features, along with global characteristics, enhancing the model's representational capacity.

Pain is a multifaceted phenomenon that affects a substantial portion of the population. Reliable and consistent evaluation supports individuals experiencing pain and enables the development of effective and advanced management strategies. Automatic pain-assessment systems provide continuous monitoring, guide clinical decision-making, and aim to reduce distress while preventing functional decline. Incorporating physiological signals allows these systems to deliver objective, accurate insights into an individual's condition. This study has been submitted to the Second Multimodal Sensing Grand Challenge for Next-Gen Pain Assessment (AI4PAIN). The proposed method introduces a pipeline that employs electrodermal activity signals as the input modality. Multiple signal representations are generated and visualized as waveforms, which are then jointly presented within a unified multi-representation diagram. Extensive experiments using diverse processing and filtering techniques, along with various representation combinations, highlight the effectiveness of the approach. It consistently achieves comparable and, in several cases, superior results to traditional fusion methods, positioning it as a robust alternative for integrating different signal representations or modalities.

Pain is a serious worldwide health problem that affects a vast proportion of the population. For efficient pain management and treatment, accurate classification and evaluation of pain severity are necessary. However, this can be challenging as pain is a subjective sensation-driven experience. Traditional techniques for measuring pain intensity, e.g. self-report scales, are susceptible to bias and unreliable in some instances. Consequently, there is a need for more objective and automatic pain intensity assessment strategies. In this paper, we develop PainAttnNet (PAN), a novel transfomer-encoder deep-learning framework for classifying pain intensities with physiological signals as input. The proposed approach is comprised of three feature extraction architectures: multiscale convolutional networks (MSCN), a squeeze-and-excitation residual network (SEResNet), and a transformer encoder block. On the basis of pain stimuli, MSCN extracts short- and long-window information as well as sequential features. SEResNet highlights relevant extracted features by mapping the interdependencies among features. The third module employs a transformer encoder consisting of three temporal convolutional networks (TCN) with three multi-head attention (MHA) layers to extract temporal dependencies from the features. Using the publicly available BioVid pain dataset, we test the proposed PainAttnNet model and demonstrate that our outcomes outperform state-of-the-art models. These results confirm that our approach can be utilized for automated classification of pain intensity using physiological signals to improve pain management and treatment.

Sensory and emotional experiences such as pain and empathy are relevant to mental and physical health. The current drive for automated pain recognition is motivated by a growing number of healthcare requirements and demands for social interaction make it increasingly essential. Despite being a trending area, they have not been explored in great detail. Over the past decades, behavioral science and neuroscience have uncovered mechanisms that explain the manifestations of pain. Recently, also artificial intelligence research has allowed empathic machine learning methods to be approachable. Generally, the purpose of this paper is to review the current developments for computational pain recognition and artificial empathy implementation. Our discussion covers the following topics: How can AI recognize pain from unimodality and multimodality? Is it necessary for AI to be empathic? How can we create an AI agent with proactive and reactive empathy? This article explores the challenges and opportunities of real-world multimodal pain recognition from a psychological, neuroscientific, and artificial intelligence perspective. Finally, we identify possible future implementations of artificial empathy and analyze how humans might benefit from an AI agent equipped with empathy.

Abstract--Currently there is no validated objective measure of pain. Recent neuroimaging studies have explored the feasibility of using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure alterations in brain function in evoked and ongoing pain. In this study, we applied multi-task machine learning methods to derive a practical algorithm for pain detection derived from fNIRS signals in healthy volunteers exposed to a painful stimulus. Especially, we employed multi-task multiple kernel learning to account for the inter-subject variability in pain response. Our results support the use of fNIRS and machine learning techniques in developing objective pain detection, and also highlight the importance of adopting personalized analysis in the process.