To assess infant pain through software could enable major advances in the field of pediatrics. Illustration. University of California, San Diego
To measure the degree of pain experienced by a child can be complicated, but a new method, recently developed by the School of Medicine of San Diego (University of California), seems to prove itself. It uses software that decodes facial expressions and was
Children and adolescents usually express their level of pain on a scale from zero to ten, but the research team explains that most children have difficulties to assess, let alone infants who can not speak.
In these cases, medical personnel must sometimes perform clinical tests of pain assessment, but even with the help of parents, these tests often underestimate the sensations felt by small, like explains the author of the study, Jeannie Huang.
In addition, these pain tests are often organized at the request of the hospital staff, which does not necessarily coincide with the times most relevant to the child, said Dr. Huang.
The software used for the study uses the well known system of Facial Action Coding System (FACS), based on recognition of facial movements , developed in Sweden.
Using this software, the researchers analyzed facial expressions of 50 suffering children, aged 5 to 18 years.
All the participants in this study were patients of Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego, where they had undergone surgery, the removal of the appendix through laparoscopy.
They filmed children at three different intervals after surgery. First the day after the intervention, a day after then during a control visit between two and four weeks after surgery.
The video recordings made with the help of the software have were compared with self-reports of pain for children and those issued by the medical staff and parents about the smaller ones.
“The software showed good or excellent, precision of the assessment of pain, “said Dr. Huang. “Overall, this technology has yielded results as good as those of the respondents and better parents than those of nurses. It also showed strong correlations with self-reports of patients.”
” Accurate assessment of pain is a fundamental principle of the supply of care, “said Dr. Huang.
The prevention of pain is not a matter of comfort, Dr. Huang says it helps healing because several previous studies have shown that untreated pain could result in adverse surgical results.
A study about this software has been relayed by the journal Pediatrics .
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