Tangible Interactions for Pain Assessment in Palliative Care

Extensive pain is a common reality for cancer patients, which requires proactive assessment and management from healthcare professionals. Clinical pain assessment commonly relies on quantification to construct quasi-objective measures for documenting and communicating pain experiences. Here, self-reporting through numeric or verbal scales is the gold standard for indicating pain intensity. However, there is a need for non-intrusive tools for easily repeatable, in situ pain assessments. We explore using a tangible pain assessment system, Grasp, for self-reporting and assessing pain in palliative care. In a field trial with 34 patients and 4 nurses, we examined how tangible interaction facilitates repeated self-reporting of pain experiences and how visualizations of these interactions encourage communication between nurses and patients during pain assessment. Our study highlights how combining multi-dimensional pain reporting through tangible interaction and visualizations can support existing practices and contribute to a holistic, dynamic understanding of patients’ experiences by supporting conversations and event recall.