Multimodal Pain Assessment Based on Physiological Biosignals: The Impact of Demographic Factors on Perception and Sensitivity

Elisavet Pavlidou, Elisavet Pavlidou, Manolis Tsiknakis, Manolis Tsiknakis

2025

Abstract

Pain is a multidimensional and highly personalized sensation that affects individuals’ physical and emotional state. Visual analog scales, numeric rate indicators, and various questionnaires, all relying on patient-reported outcome measurements, are considered the “gold” standard methods for assessing the severity of pain. Nevertheless, self-report tools require cognitive, linguistic, and social abilities, which may manifest variations in certain populations such as neonates, individuals with intellectual disabilities, and those affected by dementia. The purpose of this study is to automate the process through multimodal physiological-data-driven machine-learning models in order to gain deeper insights into pain sensation. We developed a pipeline using electrocardiogram (ECG), galvanic skin response (GSR), and electromyogram (EMG), along with demographic information from the BioVid dataset. The Pan & Tompkins algorithm was applied for ECG signal processing, while statistical analysis was used for feature extraction across all signals. Our study achieved 82.83% accuracy in the SVM classification task of baseline (BL) vs the highest level of pain (PA4) for females aged 20-35.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Pavlidou E. and Tsiknakis M. (2025). Multimodal Pain Assessment Based on Physiological Biosignals: The Impact of Demographic Factors on Perception and Sensitivity. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health - Volume 1: ICT4AWE; ISBN 978-989-758-743-6, SciTePress, pages 320-329. DOI: 10.5220/0013426800003938

in Bibtex Style

@conference{ict4awe25,
author={Elisavet Pavlidou and Manolis Tsiknakis},
title={Multimodal Pain Assessment Based on Physiological Biosignals: The Impact of Demographic Factors on Perception and Sensitivity},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health - Volume 1: ICT4AWE},
year={2025},
pages={320-329},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013426800003938},
isbn={978-989-758-743-6},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health - Volume 1: ICT4AWE
TI - Multimodal Pain Assessment Based on Physiological Biosignals: The Impact of Demographic Factors on Perception and Sensitivity
SN - 978-989-758-743-6
AU - Pavlidou E.
AU - Tsiknakis M.
PY - 2025
SP - 320
EP - 329
DO - 10.5220/0013426800003938
PB - SciTePress