HSBI Tests AI-Enabled PainChek® App for Improved Pain Assessment and Outcomes in Dementia Care

Bielefeld (hsbi). Under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Rena Amelung from the Faculty of Health at Hochschule Bielefeld – University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSBI), the PainChek® pain assessment app, which is already approved in Europe, is being tested in Germany for the first time. As part of the research project, HSBI is cooperating with five nursing homes to evaluate the application of the app in patients with moderate to severe dementia who can no longer adequately express their pain verbally.

Specifically, the current pain state is recorded in parallel using the German-language PainChek® app and the recognized “Assessment of Pain in Dementia (BESD)” scale. In addition, the patients’ pain medication is evaluated according to the WHO’s pain ladder.

Background information on the PainChek® app:

PainChek® is the world’s first medical device for the assessment of pain, with regulatory clearance in Australia, Canada, the European Union, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, and the United Kingdom.

The app uses AI-driven technology and user-guided features to identify pain with consistency in any care setting, creating personalised pain profiles that help deliver better care outcomes. It is an observational tool for pain assessment consisting of 42 sub-areas distributed across face, voice, movement, behavior, activity, and body. The sub-areas of PainChek® cover all pain domains recommended by the American Geriatrics Society for accurate and reliable observation of pain assessment in people with cognitive impairment.

The sub-areas in the “face” domain, however, are based on the facial action coding system (FACS) because behavioral pain scales that use objective facial measurements have better psychometric properties than those that use only imprecise descriptions of facial expressions.

The PainChek app was developed at Curtin University in Australia and is routinely used for pain assessment in approximately 45,000 dementia patients in Australian nursing homes. Following a successful validation study in the United Kingdom in 2021, the app is now being used there for at least 15,000 dementia patients and is reimbursed by the National Health Service (NHS).

The Faculty of Health at HSBI is responsible for the organization and implementation of the project, which includes data analysis and publication. An ethics application has been submitted to the Ethics Committee of the Westphalia-Lippe Medical Chamber to obtain ethical clearance.

The project is funded by PainChek and runs from 1 February 2025 to 31 December 2025. (vku)