There is currently a wave of postings and messages on social media under the hashtag #frauenticket, according to which the majority of women report that their pain was sometimes not taken seriously for years, often dismissed as psychological ‘weirdness’ and therefore not treated accordingly. Those affected suffer from this ‘medical gaslighting’, especially in the case of diseases that have not yet been researched or are new, such as Long Covid: doctors negate the women's pain or actually treat them incorrectly.
Pain aspects are visualised
This is precisely where the ‘Embodied Perceptions’ project comes in, which was launched in September under the leadership of the AIT Centre for Technology Experience. The project aims to develop the foundations for a user-centric platform that enables patients to visualise their personal pain perceptions using 3D technology. Various aspects of pain - such as intensity, location, spread and type of sensation - are to be precisely depicted using visualisation methods and thus made clear and quickly comprehensible to outsiders, such as medical staff. This visualisation is intended to help both those affected themselves and medical staff to communicate and interpret the symptoms more accurately. People with any kind of physical or cognitive language impairment in particular could benefit from this. This opens up a completely new dimension to personalised diagnosis and treatment approaches for everyone involved.
Understanding pain better and treating it more effectively
‘Pain is a highly individualised experience that is often difficult to describe. In the ‘Embodied Perceptions’ project, we want to find ways to make pain visible and understandable,’ emphasises Diotima Bertel, project manager at the AIT Center for Technology Experience. ‘Diversity-sensitive 3D visualisations allow patients to express their feelings in a new way. This helps medical staff to better understand patients‘ individual pain and provide more targeted treatment,’ explains Bertel. The AIT Center for Technology Experience has many years of interdisciplinary expertise in the development of gender-sensitive, user-centred technologies and the evaluation of technologies with the help of user studies.
Outlook: Improving pain therapy with digital support
‘Embodied Perceptions’ benefits from the close collaboration between different specialist disciplines and partners with many years of experience. In addition to AIT as project coordinator, the EURAG Austria/Allianz Chronischer Schmerz association (patient perspective), the Academy for Gerontology at the Haus der Barmherzigkeit as a leading institution in long-term care, the RISC software competence centre and the technology company SYNYO are all part of the consortium. This interdisciplinary expertise ensures that both practice-oriented and digitally innovative solutions are developed in the project.
The project ‘Embodied Perceptions - Diversity-sensitive representation and visualisation of body data’ is being funded as part of the FFG FEMtech 2023 call and will run for 30 months from September 2024.