A funding programme in Wales is to support a pilot phase and evaluation of an artificial intelligence (AI) powered pain assessment tool.
Life Sciences Hub Wales, with the Gwent Regional Partnership Board via its Technology Enabled Care Programme, will be providing funding for 12 months to pilot the PainChek tool in care environments such as residential, nursing, and palliative care homes.
The tech can be used to self-report and document pain scores. For those who can’t, facial recognition technology will be used; here a smart phone camera looks at the person’s face and then analyses the images using AI driven facial recognition to recognise and record facial muscle movements indicative of pain. This process is also supported by a caregiver to observe and record pain related behaviours to calculate a pain score.
Tandeep Gill of PainChek commented: “From our discussions with care homes, it is abundantly clear they place pain management as a high priority, however, the tools currently used are sub-optimal.
“Using PainChek in a range of residential and nursing care homes across Gwent means we will be able to support them in improving management of pain for their residents. This will deliver immediate benefits including an increase in the number and accuracy of assessments conducted at the point of care. This can lead to better decision-making from MDTs that is shown to reduce the prescribing of anti-psychotic medication, support one-to-one care requirements and hospital admissions, and inform improvements to dietary and nutritional strategies.
“The agreement to fund the pilot is excellent news for the local and regional care sector, as well as great recognition of the significant role that PainChek can play in achieving effective management of pain in numerous care and nursing settings. We see this programme as the first step in rolling out PainChek across Wales.”
Aimee Twinberrow, Project Lead within Life Sciences Hub Wales, added: “Life Science Hub Wales is delighted to be partnering with PainChek to help support nurses and care staff with making decisions about pain medication, with this project providing an initial evaluation to support its wider roll out and adoption across health and social care in Wales. Technology like this can help to better manage pain levels and therefore play an important role in improving the overall quality of life and outcomes for people.”
Care homes providing dementia, palliative, complex and learning disabilities care are now being invited to apply to be part of the pilot programme.
