HERO PAIN APP WILL TRANSFORM PAIN MONITORING

Since the 1970s, pain assessment has remained highly subjective whereby the patient reports a score of 1 to 10 or points to a series of smiley or frowning faces to indicate severity of their pain. This subjective & fairly generic method can lead to bias by clinicians who might actually under treat pain, especially soon after an injury. Untreated pain can lead to chronic pain (lasting over 3 months). 

Hero Medical will show that an image can "capture a thousand words." Your unique facial expression tells far more than a cartoon smiley face and will help guide more appropriate care. Just like a thumbprint is unique to you, so is your facial expression. Furthermore, your facial micro-expressions visible to trained computer vision, can detect subtle changes that a nurse or physician might not detect. These unique facial changes, as analyzed along with your vital sign changes and subjective pain scores, could serve as a unique biomarker to better understand your unique response to your injury. 

50% of patients after a head injury will suffer from chronic pain, and research shows that improved pain treatment as early as in the Emergency Room can improve outcomes.

Hero Medical is developing a tool to aid ER clinicians to better assess pain and changes in vital signs (especially rise in heart rate or drop in blood pressure), crucial secondary complications after a head injury. 

We created 2 distinct Machine Learning Models to predict severity of pain among patients:

Model 1 showed computer vision could determine if person was suffering from pain based on facial images. 

Models 2 analyzed over 152,000 ambulance patients with head injury, and determined which factors best predicted if a patient would report high or low pain.

This App will help combine our two models to transform pain assessment for head injury and other pain-related injuries.

By utilizing this App to track your pain, heart rate, and location of pain after your injury, you are helping Hero Medical better identify how to validate our Machine Learning Models. Our next version will include predictions and AI-based summaries to send to your medical provider.

This App, though designed initially for head injury care, will transform how pain is assessed objectively, and related to your unique response to pain. Facial expression & pupillary changes in combination with vital sign changes will offer a precision medicine platform for pain detection. 

Using this patent pending method, we will train Machine Learning models to predict the worsening of pain so that the appropriate treatment can be provided before onset of worsening pain.