Objective Pain Assessment Using Vital Signs

Abstract

Pain is considered as an emotional experience and unrestful feeling associated with tissue damage. The feeling of pain occurs when the interpretation starts in brain; as a signal is sent through nerve fiber to the brain. Pain allows the body to prevent further tissue damage. Since there are different ways of expressing and feeling pain, the experience of pain is unique for everybody. In this respect, objective pain assessment is a key step and a major challenge in proper management of pain in different individuals. In this study, we offer a computational solution for objective assessment of pain using vital signs. To this end, we have reported the prediction for existence of pain by calculating the performances of several computational methods that take the sequence of vital signs acquired until pain observation as input. We claim that the use of computational intelligence methods can encourage computer-aided monitoring of pain in a hospitalized environment to a certain degree.