New Pain Communciation Tool: Redefining Pain Communication
Self Initiated
Pain is subjective and difficult to quantify, making patient-doctor communication a challenge. The traditional pain rating scale often leads to frustration, misinterpretation, and discomfort for both patients and medical staff.
This project introduces a new, visual-based communication method that moves beyond numerical scales, allowing patients to express pain in a more intuitive and personalized way. By integrating UX and product design strategies, the system enhances clarity, accuracy, and ease of interaction, fostering better understanding and more effective treatment.
Tackling a complex but critical issue, this design reimagines how pain is conveyed, creating a more human-centered and empathetic approach to medical communication.
Understanding Pain: Research & UX-Driven Design Thinking
The Challenge of Measuring Pain
Doctors often ask, “How badly does it hurt?”—a seemingly simple question that patients struggle to answer. They worry about minimizing pain, risking inadequate treatment, but also fear overstating it, which may make them seem like they are exaggerating.
Pain is a deeply personal experience that is difficult to express in words. As Dr. Erin Krebs explains, “You have to interpret it.” To help with this, doctors often rely on numeric pain scales (1-10) or visual cues, such as emoji faces, to assess whether a patient feels neutral, frowning, or crying.
Why Standard Measures Fall Short
Despite these tools, pain is not purely biological—it is shaped by psychological, emotional, and social factors. Dr. Christine Goertz emphasizes that numerical pain scales alone do not fully capture what a patient is experiencing.
Dr. Lauren Atlas describes pain as a decision-making process that is subconsciously influenced by multiple factors, including:
- Physical stimuli (e.g., a slipped vertebra)
- Interoception (how the body senses internal states like hunger or warmth)
- Emotional and psychological states at any given time
For example, anxiety or relaxation can change how pain is perceived. A person in a high-stress state might feel pain more intensely than someone in a calm state.
Design Implications: Rethinking Pain Assessment
The research highlights the complexity of pain perception, suggesting a need for more nuanced, user-centered pain assessment tools. A rigid numerical scale may not be enough—instead, integrating visual indicators, contextual questions, and behavioral tracking could improve accuracy in pain evaluation.
By combining in-depth research with design thinking, this project explores ways to develop more intuitive, responsive, and personalized pain assessment systems, bridging the gap between medical evaluation and real patient experience.
A key characteristic of these precedents is their user-friendly design, enabling patients to record pain information in a more detailed and structured way.
My approach focused on visually translating pain, using insights from patient and doctor interviews to understand how pain is described and experienced. By referencing human body anatomy, I developed a system that accurately represents the nature, intensity, and sensation of pain, creating a more intuitive and expressive way for patients to communicate their discomfort.
Through my research on existing pain communication methods, I discovered that patients primarily need a clearer, more effective way to convey their pain to doctors. This led me to explore a new visual system for expressing pain, functioning as a universal ‘pain language’—much like alphabets in verbal communication.
The concept evolved in a way similar to visualizing a galaxy, where each sensation, intensity, and location of pain forms a dynamic, interconnected system, allowing patients to express their experience with greater clarity and precision. This approach reflects creative, human-centered design thinking, transforming an abstract and highly subjective experience into a structured, intuitive communication tool.
Sketches
Iterations
• Bent 2D Interface (Adobe Illustrator)
• Twisted 3D Interface (Blender-stl)
• Torsion 3D Interface (Adobe Photoshop)
Prototypes
Integrate and Test Both Prototypes
Key Features of the Mobile App’s Main Page
3D model