Interactive graphics for multidimensional pain assessment - a human-centered design and evaluation study with patients suffering from chronic pain

In clinical contexts, pain is normally assessed by self-report using numeric rating scales and questionnaires. This practice reduces the possibility of expressing individual pain experience to a few numeric options. Developed by the research groups of Mühlenberend and Willmann at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and the Team of the Clinic for Interdisciplinary Multimodal Pain Therapy at the University Hospital in Jena, the approach presented here, fosters an alternative form of qualitative pain documentation using interactive and parametric graphics. These allow to express the pain individually through fluidly adjustable visualizations. In this study, a set of prototypical graphics was used to characterize and validate input combinations, input forms, number of parameters and, ultimately, general visualization strategies. The results indicate that the approach is promising and beneficial in the context of pain therapy, and it could be potentially transferred to mobile and other “smart” applications.