Reading the signals

“Mommy, it hurts!”

The cry of a child in pain tugs at any parent or caregiver. In a hospital setting, the ability to assess a child’s level of pain is important for timely pain interventions as well as alerting medical staff to other potential problems. But accurately assessing a child’s pain level in a clinical environment is difficult.

Scientists at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine have tackled this problem by developing a method for measuring pediatric pain using facial recognition software, according to a report in UCSD News.

In a study published last month in the journal Pediatrics, the researchers took videos of 50 children who had undergone appendectomies. They used the software to analyze pain-related facial expressions, using clinical data to “train” the computer to associate certain expressions with levels of pain. The result is a tool that can continuously monitor a patient, providing accurate pain level scores.

“The current methods by which we analyze pain in kids are suboptimal,” senior author Dr. Jeannie Huang told UCSD News. “In this study, we developed and tested a new instrument, which allowed us to automatically assess pain in children in a clinical setting. We believe this technology, which enables continuous pain monitoring, can lead to better and more timely pain management.”

Hospitalized children are often too young to describe the intensity of their pain on the standard 0 to 10 scale. As a result, clinical pain assessments of children are often done by nursing staff with the assistance of parents. But previous studies report that nursing staff often underestimate pain in pediatric patients. And parents, who are more likely to assess their child’s pain accurately, may not always be around.

Huang added that pain checks may not coincide with times when pain occurs and intervention is needed. Since the instrument is capable of “operating in real-time and continuously,” it can alert medical staff to instances of pain when they occur, noted Huang.

The researchers compared the computer-generated pain scores with child self-reporting and parent and nurse proxy pain estimations. “The software demonstrated good-to-excellent accuracy in assessing pain conditions,” said Huang. “Overall, this technology performed equivalent to parents and better than nurses.”

Social dish

We can’t yet capture the taste or texture of a wonderfully presented meal, but we can certainly take a photograph of it. As more and more restaurant diners use their smartphones and photo-based social media apps such as Instagram to post images of their favorite dishes, the trend is beginning to affect the way chefs market themselves and their creations.

“It’s all about exposure,” chef Dominique Crenn of Atelier Crenn in San Francisco told Wired magazine. “Instagram came to give a voice to chefs and to the food they serve.”

Crenn, with more than 12,000 Instagram followers, knows social media can build a chef’s reputation and clientele. And many chefs use Instagram to gather ideas and learn from and be inspired by each other.

But bad cell phone pictures of a beautifully plated dish can be worse than a bad review. “It affects me when I see a bad review,” chef Ned Bell of the Four Seasons Hotel in Vancouver told Wired. “But it affects me more when someone takes a bad photo of my food. I worry about what my food looks like on the social media world.” —M.C.