Personalized pain diary on a handheld device

Abstract

With our ageing society, the group of less-computer literate patients is currently growing. Thus, all treatments involving patient cooperation need to address this type of patient into the procedure, well aware of human short comings in punctuality and reliability. We propose to ameliorate these error sources by making use of computerized time stamps and a sophisticated handheld finger-tip user-interface to support unexperienced patients to maintain a reliable pain and medication diary. The diary is individualized by predefining a set of medications and their proper use by a medical doctor. The pain diary application is running on a state-of-theart hand-held device featuring touch screen and gesture recognition. The application reminds the patient to judge his/her pain status according to the Visual Analog Scale (VAS) up to several times a day at predefined intervalls. At those given times, the patient inputs his medication intake according to the predefined list or with a free text editor. Other events (like meals or bowel movements) may be manually logged as well. To transfer the data back to the practitioner, the handheld device uploads accumulated data as XML-files by cable connection, or by a secure WLAN connection to a dedicated desktop PC, thus enabling the practitioner to analyze the patient log.