Healthcare is defined by precision and measurable amounts. We use precision guided technologies to make surgeries a success, and we administer a specific amount of medication or anesthesia, but the most subjetive and likely most frustrating aspect of healthcare is when trying to measure pain.
Pain is subjective, meaning it is different for everybody. What might be a 10 on the traditional pain scale for one person may be a 5 for another person. As you might have guessed, this can make it very hard to treat pain conditions.
But what if pain could be measured on an objective scale? What if we we could make a standard, objective scale for a measurement once thought to be purely subjective? That’s a question two brothers are currently trying to tackle.
Objective Pain Scale
The quest for developing an objective pain scale came about in part because Yariv Adan, a senior product manager for Google in Zurich, suffered a devastating motorcycle accident back in 2014 that left him with broken bones, torn muscles and paralysis of his right arm. Getting over his physical injuries was manageable, but dealing with daily pain made life difficult for Adan.
“Imagine presenting or interviewing with strong pain. Imagine waking up multiple times every night because of pain. Imagine pain always there with you — on your vacation, kid’s birthday, long business trip, when you drive, when you kiss — e-v-e-r-y day for the rest of your life,” Adan wrote in a blog post in March 2018, describing his situation.
One day Adan connected with his second cousin Ariel Assaf, a serial entrepreneur who was looking for his next project. They decided that attempting to develop a product that could objectify pain would be worth a shot.
“Talking to him I realized just how frustrated he was about his pain and about how little modern medicine had to offer him,” Assaf said in an interview with The Times of Israel in Tel Aviv, where he now lives. “So I started talking to pain doctors in the US and Europe and I heard a shockingly constant story: they feel they are treating patients in the dark, and the remedies they offered were not evidence-based. They were very upfront about how frustrated they are by the lack of evidence and jealous of other fields that have measures with which they can work.”
Doctors currently try to get a better understanding of one’s pain by asking certain questions, like how much does it hurt on a scale from 1-10, and what makes your pain worse? But these just lead to a subjective description of pain.
In 2017, Adan and Assaf founded Lab 39 and a product called Genie. Genie is a type of smart wristband that uses sensors and a smartphone app to track pain. It monitors your sleep patterns, physical activity and heart rate, all of which are known to react to pain, and it also asks the wearer for regular pain updates where the user inputs their pain using a pain scale. All this information is sent to the cloud and can be accessed by doctors to get a much better understanding of a patient’s pain.
“With the technology, doctors will now be able to just look at a chart, just as they would for blood pressure, which is the way it should be,” said Assaf.
Adan says the app is easy to use, and it collects plenty of data on its own, so it doesn’t bog down the wearer with constant input. The duo is currently working on getting doctors on board, then they’ll work with the insurance companies to help keep costs down. Assuming all goes well, the product could soon become the standard for pain care across the world!