Improving Pain Management amongst Patients with Dementia

Abstract

This thesis developed, validated and implemented a multimodal, point-of-care pain assessment tool for people with moderate-to-severe dementia unable to self-report. PainChek® is a novel smart device-enabled application, which uses automated facial analysis to identify pain-relevant facial markers in conjunction with clinical pain behaviours to estimate pain intensity. PainChek® was shown to have sound psychometric and clinimetric properties. Clinical implementation demonstrated a significant advance in pain assessment, allowing optimal pain management for this population.