Automatic Pain Assessment with Ultra-short Electrodermal Activity Signal

Abstract

Automatic pain assessment systems can help patients get timely and effective pain relief treatment whenever needed. Such a system aims to provide the service with pain identification and pain intensity rating functions. Among the physiological signals, the electrodermal activity (EDA) signal emerges as a promising feature to support both functions in pain assessment. In this work, we propose a machine learning framework to implement pain identification and pain intensity rating using only EDA and its derived features. Our solution also explores the feasibility of using ultra-short EDA segmentation of about 5 seconds to meet real-time requirements. We evaluate our system on two datasets: Biovid, a publicly available dataset, and Apon, the one we build. Experimental results demonstrate that using just the ultra-short EDA signal as input, our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and achieves a low regression error of 0.90.