New Approach to Objective Pain Assessments
MIE Professor and Interim Chair Yingzi Lin’s research on pain assessment and management practices appeared in the September 2024 issue of Nature. She is studying a “Continuous Objective Multimodal Pain Assessment Sensing System” to advance the field of pain management research and patient safety, which could also reduce opioid dependency.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services identified pain management as one of the five key strategies to address the opioid crisis, which is a national emergency. Doctors rely primarily on a patient’s subjective assessment of pain using visual scales to rate pain intensity from 0 to 10.
Lin and her team explored objective pain assessment and management practices, gathering valuable data through research projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation that were conducted at her lab and in a clinical setting. Lin hopes to develop an automated AI system for use at the patient’s bedside. The system, which will provide scientific data to complement a patient’s subjective rating, will enable doctors to make more effective treatment decisions, avoid overprescribing pain pills that can lead to addiction, and help patients who are in severe pain.
Lin says this problem impacts everyone in some way, and she is committed to improving the quality of human lives.