Multimodal Detection of Pain and Anticipation Anxiety from Ultra-Short Duration Wearable Sensors Measurements

With the continued rise in outpatient surgical procedures, modern medicine requires more advanced tools for pain and anxiety monitoring and management. The current standard of care requires patient responses on visual analog scales, which may be subjective and are difficult to assess when a subject is unresponsive. Electrodermal activity (EDA) and pulse rate variability (PRV), two non-invasive, wearable, and objective measurements of sympathetic nervous system activity, can help provide insight into a patient’s psychological or emotional state without user input, allowing for continued monitoring even when a patient is unable to respond. However, methods based on these measurements have largely been relegated to longer duration (>60 s) or post hoc analysis, which does not suit the needs of medical care environments. Here we propose new methods for handling ultra-short (<10 s) signals to allow rapid evaluation of pain and anxiety state. We show how machine learning models trained on these signals can obtain high degrees of classification performance (AUC > 0.88) between no pain or anxiety and medium or higher pain and anxiety on signals obtained during two different forms of painful stimulation. We also show how these signals can measure the degree of stimulation irrespective of perceived pain from the patient. Further development of these algorithms will allow for greater monitoring and control of patient comfort in a clinical setting.