Technology shares pain perception measured by brain waves

How much pain do you feel on a scale of one to 10?

This simple method is still the way pain is measured in doctors’ offices, clinics and hospitals, but how do I know if my five out of 10 is the same as yours?

A new early-stage platform aims to more objectively measure and share our individual perception of pain. It measures the brain activity of two people to understand how their experiences compare and recreate one person’s pain for the other. The platform was developed as a partnership between large Tokyo-based telecommunications company NTT Docomo and start-up pamelaabbreviation for Pain Measurement Laboratory, in Osaka, Japan.

It’s part of a Docomo project called Feel the technology. “We are developing a human augmentation platform designed to deepen mutual understanding between people,” said a Docomo representative. IEEE Spectrum by email. (Answers were originally provided in Japanese and translated by Docomo’s public relations department.) “Previously, we focused on sharing movement, tapand taste—Senses that are inherently difficult to express and communicate. This time, we focused on pain, another sense that is difficult to articulate.”

Docomo demonstrated the platform last month at the Combined exhibition of advanced technologies (CEATEC), Japan’s largest electronics trade fair.

How shared pain perception technology works

The system consists of three components: a pain sensing device, a platform for estimating the difference in sensitivity, and a heat-based actuation device.

First, the system uses electroencephalography (EEG) to measure brain waves and uses an artificial intelligence model to “visualize” pain as a score between 0 and 100, for both the sender and the receiver. The actuation device is then calibrated based on the sensitivity of each person, so a sensation transmitted to both people will be the same.

In this initial version, the platform works with thermally induced pain stimuli. “This method allows for precise fit and ensures safety during research and development,” says Docomo. PaMeLa also used thermal stimulation in her research to determine pain intensity level, which scored pain stimulation data from 461 subjects with machine learning algorithms.

However, the company says, pain from other sources can also be shared. Ultimately, Docomo aims to convey many types of physical and even psychological pain, which will be a target of future research. “We think there are several possibilities for how to capture and share pain,” Docomo says.

Finding a use case for shared pain perception

The technology is still in a very early stage, he says Carlos Saabfounder and director of the Cleveland Clinic Pain Consortium. Saab, who is also an adjunct professor at Brown University, researches pain biomarkers, including using EEG measurements and artificial intelligence.

On the one hand, Saab says it is not clear what the use case for the platform is. In terms of science, hHe also notes that pain differs in healthy patients and those who experience ongoing pain, such as chronic pain or migraine. “If you induce pain in a healthy volunteer versus someone who is a pain patient, the nature of the pain representation in the brain is different,” says Saab. Healthy volunteers know that the pain will be temporary, he explains. But in real patients, chronic pain is often accompanied by anxiety, depression, and sometimes medication side effects.

In a study Saab conducted several years ago, for example, he induced pain by submerging volunteers’ arms in ice for an extended period. When he did the same with patients in pain, the resulting brain activity was much more complex and the signals were not as clear.

Docomo says it plans to collaborate with hospitals in the future to verify the technology in medical settings. And in March, PaMeLa announced that it was completed a clinical trial that analyzed changes in EEG signals before and after the administration of analgesics in patients undergoing surgeries under general anesthesia. The startup is also researching pain in other conditions, such as exercise, acute pain from injections, and chronic pain.

“Pain is a multidimensional experience,” says Saab. “When you say you’re measuring someone’s pain, you always have to be careful about what kind of dimension you’re measuring.”