So here's my concept.
In the medical profession it would undoubtedly be extremely difficult for a doctor or nurse to truly understand how much pain a patient may be suffering. If there were a way to measure the pain of a patient, this would greatly assist the process of diagnosis and prescription of drugs. Powerful painkillers such as morphine is expensive and sometime dangerous. By measuring and quantifying a patients pain doctors and nurses can be more efficient and accurate in their jobs, and would be an invaluable tool for anesthetists. In addition, with the growing drug problem today, there are many addicts to painkillers. Addicts often fake pain suffering in order to gain access to dangerous prescription pain killers. With a pain measuring device, you could tell if a someone is really suffering pain, or just a junkie. It would also be useful for measuring how much pain a certain person can take. May be useful for selecting members of the SAS? I dunno. The device would have to analyse the inputs to determine the perceived pain.
The inputs would be to monitor certain aspects of a patients body that would be affected by pain, physical and physiological responses to pain. These could be measured with existing technology. Heart rate, blood pressure, brain waves etc. With new facial recognition technology, a camera observing a patients facial expressions could determine how genuine and how intense a patients emotions are. A bit like a lie detector test, but more comprehensive and analyzing more physical responses.
First thing I will need to do is research the effects of pain on a human being, and what natural responses occur in a persons body. Something that can be measured that is accurately proportional to inflicted pain. Then we can go about designing a scale to quantify someone's pain and nice user friendly interface to view the information.
>WILL
2 comments:
pain is really hard to measure objectively because it is largely subjective and can be influenced by the placebo effect. apart from just asking patient to rate their pain on a 1 to 10 scale, sometimes what doctors also do to measure pain is to setup a machine that administers painkiller, and tell the patient to push a button on the machine to release the drug whenever they feel they are in pain. the machine has an upper limit set by the doctor so the patient can't overdose him/herself, but the patient is unaware of this limit. this takes the placebo effect into account, and the number of times the patient pushed the button after reaching the dose limit is counted by the machine too so the doctors can tell if the patient is truly in pain and needs more drug. just thought of this, the pressure (how hard the patient presses the button) might also be an interesting factor to measure.
Wei-Pai
creating a machine based on pain is an excellent idea.
people react and feel pain in different ways so therfore their scale of pain would be higher or lower, depending on the person!
the factors you want to consider are gender (a study has recently proven that women experiance more pain then men), whether the pain is mental or physical (i.e. psychiatric (sorry about the apelling)) and the scale of which the painometer will go to? because people will have different ideas of 10 and 1.
overall i think it is a great topic to use.
-georgia
Post a Comment