Posted on
11 March 2025
Read time
1 minute
This study was led by Prof Liz Sampson from the Academic Centre of Healthy Ageing, working with Prof Nathan Davies and Dr Victoria Vickerstaff from the Wolfson Centre for Population Health, QMUL.
It looked at a smartphone based app called PainChek that uses facial expressions to understand whether the person being photographed is experiencing pain. The team recruited 63 people living with dementia and showed that the tool worked well across multiple users, diagnosed pain at an acceptable rate when compared with existing questionnaire based tools, and was good at telling when people were in pain, and not in pain.
Based upon these findings, PainChek is a reliable way to determine when people living with dementia are experiencing pain. We need, now, to conduct research to understand how it might be implemented in practice.
You can read the full article here.
