Voice-Based Pain Level Classification for Sensor-Assisted Intelligent Care

Various sensors are increasingly being adopted to support intelligent healthcare systems, which address the growing problem of staff shortages in assisted-living communities. In this context, detecting and assessing pain remain critical yet challenging tasks in both clinical and non-clinical settings. Traditional approaches such as self-reporting, physiological signal monitoring, and facial expression analysis often face limitations related to accessibility, equipment costs, and the need for professional support. To overcome these challenges in this work, we investigate a sensor-assisted system for pain detection and propose a lightweight framework that enables real-time classification of pain levels using acoustic sensors. Our system exploits the spectral features of voice signals that strongly correlate with pain to train Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models. Our system has been validated through simulations in Jupiter Notebook and a Raspberry Pi-based hardware prototype. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed three-level pain classification approach obtains an average accuracy of 72.74%, outperforming existing methods with the same pain-level granularity by 18.94-26.74% and achieving performance comparable to that of binary pain detection methods. Our hardware prototype, built from commercial off-the-shelf components for under 100 USD, achieves real-time processing speeds ranging from approximately 6 to 22 s. In addition to CNN models, our experiments demonstrate that other machine learning algorithms, such as Artificial Neural Networks, XGBoost, Random Forests, and Decision Trees, also prove to be applicable within our pain level classification framework.