3-D Pain Drawings and Seating Pressure Maps: Relationships and Challenges

Abstract

Abstract-Mobility impaired people constitute a significant portion of the adult population, which often experience back pain at some point during their lifetime. Such pain is usually characterized by severe implications reflected on both their personal lives, as well as on a country's health and economic systems. The traditional 2-dimensional (2D) representations of the human body often used can be limited in their ability to efficiently visualize such pain for diagnosis purposes. Yet, patients have been shown to prefer such drawings. However, considering that pain is a feeling or emotion that is subjective in nature, the pain drawings could be consequently regarded as a subjective means of communicating such pain. As a result, the work described in this paper proposes an alternative, which encompasses a 3-dimensional (3D) pain visualization solution, developed in a previous work of ours. This alternative is complemented with the upcoming technique of pressure mapping for more objectivity in the pain data collection. The results of this study have shown that the proposed approach is a promising solution for the purpose intended, and it could generally prove to be a significant complementary method in the area of medical practice for the mobility impaired community.

Midline back pain: A literature review

“…Three-dimensional (3D) pain drawings, although perceived by their physicians 'very positively, and with great enthusiasm', seem only to add the two lateral side views to the record. 4,38 The record is on actual body photograph images with superimposed maps of the pain indicated by the patient. The system used was the 3D pain drawing application (see ref 39 ) on a laptop running Microsoft Windows Vista.…”