Evidation Health https://evidation.com is contributing up to one million to the “Digital Signals in Chronic Pain Project”, a 10,000 person chronic pain study to quantify real-life outcomes in chronic pain patients who can contribute to the opioid addiction epidemic. Finding effective treatment options for pain is complicated by the fact that each person can experience chronic pain in a different way.
The goal of the study is to shed new light on the spectrum of chronic pain experiences in individuals through new digital methods. The project is going to develop digital biomarkers for chronic pain severity, pain flare ups, and quality of life. This is the first large-scale study to digitally obtain and analyze everyday behavioral data in order to try to understand outcomes in individuals experiencing chronic pain.
Despite our society’s high prevalence of chronic pain, finding effective treatment options is complicated by the fact that each person experiences chronic pain in a different way. This study aims to shed new light on the spectrum of chronic pain experiences in individuals through new digital methods.
According to Deborah Kilpatrick, PhD, Evidation Health’s CEO, “We are running this large scale pain study to gain powerful insights on how behavioral factors are associated with health outcomes for chronic pain patients.”
“Novel research methodologies will enable the quantification of real-life outcomes in chronic pain,” said Christine Sang, M.D, director of Translational Pain Research at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital https://www.brighamandwomens.org and a consultant to the study.
The project will involve questioning whether mobile health data collected on smartphones and wearable can be used to treat people effectively with chronic pain. Researchers will study whether the data when combine with information such as weather, diet, genomic information, and medical data can be used to accurately identify when a person is in pain and the extent of the pain.