The team, working on a project financed by the Institute for Innovation through Science and Technology (IWT), has developed a smart camera which can be taught to recognise the signs of pain on a patient’s face and in his or her body language. The conventional wisdom on the pain suffered by dementia patients appears to be based on underestimates.

The main problem is that patients in an advanced state of dementia are unable to explain where and in what situations they are experiencing pain. Facial expressions and body language can be revealing, but care workers spend relatively little time observing patients directly, so that many of the signs go unseen.

The system developed by the team, which has been running on a trial basis for two years at the De Wingerd care centre in Leuven, involves two cameras acting as pain sensors, and relaying their observations to a computer. To help differentiate expressions of pain from other expressions, the cameras are “taught” to distinguish by experienced health care workers.

As a result of the technology, researchers have found that dementia patients suffer more often and sometimes more intensely than nursing staff realise, meaning they are also under-treated. Even in the final stages of the illness, when it was thought they no longer experienced pain at all, the cameras have shown this not to be the case.

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