IoT-Based Remote Pain Monitoring System: From Device to Cloud Platform

Abstract

Facial expressions are among behavioral signs of pain that can be employed as an entry point to develop an automatic human pain assessment tool. Such a tool can be an alternative to the self-report method and particularly serve patients who are unable to self-report like patients in the intensive care unit and minors. In this paper, a wearable device with a biosensing facial mask is proposed to monitor pain intensity of a patient by utilizing facial surface electromyogram (sEMG). The wearable device works as a wireless sensor node and is integrated into an Internet of Things (IoT) system for remote pain monitoring. In the sensor node, up to eight channels of sEMG can be each sampled at 1000 Hz, to cover its full frequency range, and transmitted to the cloud server via the gateway in real time. In addition, both low energy consumption and wearing comfort are considered throughout the wearable device design for long-term monitoring. To remotely illustrate real-time pain data to caregivers, a mobile web application is developed for real-time streaming of high-volume sEMG data, digital signal processing, interpreting, and visualization. The cloud platform in the system acts as a bridge between the sensor node and web browser, managing wireless communication between the server and the web application. In summary, this study proposes a scalable IoT system for real-time biopotential monitoring and a wearable solution for automatic pain assessment via facial expressions.

Sensor Technologies to Manage the Physiological Traits of Chronic Pain: A Review

“…Another work [231] proposed a facial mask with EMG sensors for the evaluation of facial expressions as the basis of an automatic tool for the objective evaluation of human pain.…”

“…The measurement of pain in non-communicative patients is a research challenge [231,319], which extends from infants and children [322] to adults in the post-operative period, in intensive care units or with cognitive impairment. An application of great interest is the closed-loop peri-operative monitoring with the purpose of automatically controlling the administration of anesthesia [319].…”

An efficient IoT based biomedical health monitoring and diagnosing system using myRIO

“…To monitor the human pain remotely, [21] developed a wearable sensor of eight channels to read facial expressions. The data is sent through the gateway in real-time, and the caregivers receive them in mobile web application [22].…”

An automated patient monitoring using discrete‐time wireless sensor networks

“…More recently, Quer et al proposed a new technique of analyzing huge data sets obtained from home monitoring of blood pressure. Yang et al proposed an IoT‐based remote pain monitoring system and a wearable solution for automatic pain assessment via facial expressions.…”