Scope of physiological and behavioural pain assessment techniques in children – a review

Pain is an unpleasant subjective experience. At present, clinicians are using self-report or pain scales to recognise and monitor pain in children. However, these techniques are not efficient to observe the pain in children having cognitive disorder and also require highly skilled observers to measure pain. Using these techniques it is also difficult to choose the analgesic drug dosages to the patients after surgery. Thus, this conceptual work explains the demand for automatic coding techniques to evaluate pain and also it documents some evidence of techniques that act as an alternative approach for objectively determining pain in children. In this review, some good indicators of pain in children are explained in detail; they are facial expressions from an RGB image, thermal image and also feature from well proven physiological signals such as electrocardiogram, skin conductance, body temperature, surgical pleth index, pupillary reflex dilation, analgesia nociception index, photoplethysmography, perfusion index etc.