Pain assessment in medicine often relies on imprecise visual rating scales featuring smiling or crying faces, frustrating patients and physicians alike. Children's National Hospital researchers aim to change this with a new device designed to precisely measure pain, backed by an $8-million award from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) Sprint for Women's Health. The sprint addresses critical unmet challenges in women's health, champions transformative innovations and tackles health conditions that uniquely or disproportionately affect women.
Children's National researchers–with their collaborators from Johns Hopkins University and Medstar Research Institute-;are furthering the development of the AlgometRx Nociometer, a pain measurement device to better understand and treat pain. Julia Finkel, M.D.
, pediatric anesthesiologist and director of Pain Medicine Research at the Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation (SZI) at Children's National, said she hopes to improve the understanding of gender differences in pain and better treat patients of all ages with analgesics. Children's National will receive the $8 million over two years through the Sprint for Women's Health's launchpad track for later-stage health solutions. As physicians, we often feel helpless to understand how our patients are experiencing pain and whether treatments are working.
We use the Visual Analog Scale, which fails to classify the pain's etiology or help guide a speci.