Competitive Advantages:
Enhanced pain assessment accuracy, Enables continuous real-time pain monitoring without caregiver presence, Advanced analysis of multiple information sources to determine pain level.
A system and method of automatically assessing pediatric and neonatal pain using facial expressions along with crying sounds, body movement, and vital signs change to improve the diagnosis and treatment of pain in the pediatric patient population.USF inventors have developed a system for the enhanced assessment of infant pain. The inventors have developed an improved facial recognition software that is tailored to extract pain information from real-time infant videos. The results from this software are combined with crying sound, body movement, and vital sign readings. The combined data is analyzed altogether using an advanced artificial neural network developed by the inventors. The system assessed the level of infant pain with 94% accuracy when compared to conventional nurse-derived pain scores from responses that were recorded in a challenging clinical environment in early trials. The system is designed to learn and adapt over time, thus improving its accuracy. This invention is directly applicable to neonatal healthcare and will enable accurate and continuous infant pain measurement.
