Design and Development of PainBit: a Portable Device for Supporting Patients with Chronic Pain to Log their Pain

TL;DR

PainBit is a portable device designed to help chronic pain patients log their pain more effectively than traditional methods, with positive patient feedback and insights for future improvements.

Contribution

The paper introduces PainBit, a novel portable pain tracking device developed in collaboration with healthcare professionals, addressing limitations of existing pain monitoring methods.

Findings

Patients preferred PainBit over mobile apps for pain tracking.

PainBit was found useful and easy to use by patients.

Patients suggested making PainBit smaller and lighter.

Abstract

Recently, we have seen growing interest among patients with chronic conditions to track their health-related data. There are many wearable devices available to track different health data. However, tracking pain is mostly done by using pen and paper or mobile apps. In collaboration with a healthcare professional we designed a portable pain tracker, PainBit. To gain an understanding of patients' perspectives on our tracker, we conducted two case studies with patients living with chronic pain. We asked patients to use PainBit for two weeks and later conducted semi-structured interviews with them. Patients found PainBit useful for tracking their pain and they preferred using a physical device, PainBit, to track their pain over using a mobile phone. Patients suggested reducing the size and weight of PainBit in the next iterations. We report on the lessons learnt through our design process and the evaluation studies.