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.

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.

Artificial Intelligence has been playing a growing role in the world in the last few decades. What most don't understand is artificial intelligence introduces itself in numerous structures that sway everyday life. Signing into your social media, email, car ride services, and online shopping platforms, etc. all include artificial intelligence algorithms to improve customer experience. AI in healthcare is growing quickly; explicitly, in diagnostics and treatment management. As of late, AI applications in healthcare have sent huge waves across medical services, fuelling a conversation of whether AI doctors will in the end supplant human doctors in the future.

PainChek uses AI, facial recognition and smartphone technology to intelligently automate the pain assessment process at the point of care. PainChek is clinically proven to improve pain assessment and pain management for people with moderate to severe dementia in aged care. Our digital tool is available to professional carers in residential aged care facilities and home care settings. Residential aged care facilities are now eligible for a free 12-month subscription of PainChek as part of a Federal Government initiative. Learn more and submit your expression of interest here.