Feel My Pain: Design and Evaluation of Painpad, a Tangible Device for Supporting Inpatient Self-Logging of Pain

Monitoring patients' pain is a critical issue for clinical caregivers, particularly among staff responsible for providing analgesic relief. However, collecting regularly scheduled pain readings from patients can be difficult and time-consuming for clinicians. In this paper we present Painpad, a tangible device that was developed to allow patients to engage in self-logging of their pain. We report findings from two hospital-based field studies in which Painpad was deployed to a total of 78 inpatients recovering from ambulatory surgery. We find that Painpad results in improved frequency and compliance with pain logging, and that self-logged scores may be more faithful to patients' experienced pain than corresponding scores reported to nurses. We also show that older adults may prefer tangible interfaces over tablet-based alternatives for reporting their pain, and we contribute design lessons for pain logging devices intended for use in hospital settings.