Background: Accurately assessing pain severity is essential for effective pain treatment and desirable patient outcomes. In clinical settings, pain intensity assessment relies on self-reporting methods, which are subjective to individuals and impractical for non-communicative or critically ill patients. Previous studies have attempted to measure pain objectively using physiological responses to an external pain stimulus, assuming that the human subject is free of internal body pain. However, this approach does not reflect the situation in a clinical setting, where a patient subjected to an external pain stimulus may already be experiencing internal body pain. Objective: This study investigates the hypothesis that an individual’s physiological response to external pain varies in the presence of preexisting pain. Methods: We recruited 39 healthy participants aged 22–37, including 23 females and 16 males. Physiological signals – Electrodermal Activity (EDA) and Electromyography (EMG) – were recorded while participants were subject to a combination of preexisting heat pain and cold pain stimuli. Feature #engineering methods were applied to extract time-series features, and statistical analysis using ANOVA was conducted to assess significance. Results: We found that the preexisting pain influences the body’s physiological responses to an external pain stimulus. Several features—particularly those related to temporal statistics, successive differences, and distributions—showed statistically significant variation across varying preexisting pain conditions, with P-values less than .05 depending on the feature and stimulus. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that preexisting pain alters the body’s physiological response to new pain stimuli, highlighting the importance of considering pain history in objective pain assessment models.

Acoustic and Visual Data for Incipient Boiling at Local Heat Leaks in a Water This dataset presents raw acoustic, visual, and metadata collected during an experimentalstudy investigating incipient boiling at local heat leaks in a water tank. While theexperiments were conducted using water as the working fluid, the study was designed toexplore boiling phenomena relevant […] The post Applied Physics Data Set appeared first on NASA Science.

Stargardt disease is the most common form of early onset macular degeneration. Mutations in ABCA4, a member of the ATP-binding cassette (ABC) family, are associated with Stargardt disease. Here, we ha...