Challenge
Chronic pain significantly diminishes quality of life and requires ongoing, clear communication between patients and physicians for effective management. Yet because pain is inherently subjective, patients often struggle to describe their experiences in ways that physicians can interpret and act on. This project explored how design might support patients in conveying their pain more effectively to clinicians.
"How might we design digital tools that help patients communicate their pain more effectively with physicians?”
Methods
Literature Review – Examined research on chronic pain management and communication challenges, focusing on how subjective experiences are currently captured and used in clinical care.
Market Analysis – Evaluated existing digital pain management tools to identify common approaches, gaps in functionality, and opportunities for innovation.
Physician Interviews – Conducted in-depth interviews with practicing physicians to understand how they interpret patient reports of pain, what information they find most useful, and where communication breaks down.
Patient Interviews – Spoke with recent pain patients to hear their lived experiences of communicating pain, including frustrations when trying to make themselves understood.
Survey – Collected quantitative data from past patients to capture broader trends in pain reporting and self-management strategies.
Card Sorting – Used card sorting exercises with participants to identify which features would be most valuable in a digital pain communication tool.
Usability Testing – Developed early prototypes of the tool and tested them with users to assess clarity, ease of use, and alignment with both patient and physician needs.
Wireframing & Prototyping – Created low-fidelity wireframes of the app concept to explore interaction flow and test how users interacted with the design.
“I kept saying something was wrong with my knee, but the doctor brushed it off since the pain wasn’t acute. When it didn’t go away, I pushed for an MRI and it turned out I had torn my ACL.”
Insights
Chronic pain is common and debilitating. 20.4% of U.S. adults report suffering from chronic pain, and 7.4% live with high-impact chronic pain that limits daily activities. Chronic pain is one of the leading reasons Americans seek healthcare, and it is closely tied to reduced quality of life, opioid dependence, and poor mental health.
Physicians need sustained communication to treat pain effectively. Managing chronic pain requires ongoing updates from patients about how their pain changes over time in order to help physicians adjust treatments, monitor progress, and safeguard against risks like dependency.
The 1–10 pain scale is flawed but widely used. Patients experience pain differently, and a numeric scale can’t capture subjective differences. But physicians continue to use the 1–10 rating as the standard because it offers a way to track relative progress over time (e.g., a decrease from 10/10 to 7/10).
Describing pain is harder than rating it. Patients often struggle to convey the nature of their pain beyond its intensity. This communication gap can lead to misdiagnosis, delayed treatment, or prolonged discomfort.
Current digital tools don’t make communication easier. Current pain management applications rely on long scales, diagrams, and checklists to document patient’s pain. While comprehensive, this process is cumbersome for people already in pain and does not meaningfully improve communication between patients and providers.
Outcomes
Based on my research insights, I designed a concept for a mobile app that helps patients communicate pain more clearly to their physicians:
Instead of overwhelming patients with lengthy scales and categories, the app uses a rapid-fire sequence of simple binary questions (e.g., sharp vs. dull, constant vs. intermittent) to quickly compile a snapshot portrait of the user’s pain. The goal was to design an interface that works even under conditions of low cognition to reduce the burden of self-reporting when patients might be in pain or tired.
Through my research process, I identified three core requirements for an effective digital pain communication tool:
Convey the nature of pain rather than reducing it to a single numeric value.
Capture pain data quickly and with low cognitive effort, allowing patients to generate a usable snapshot of their pain even when distressed or fatigued.
Relay efficient, structured pain reports to providers so patients can maintain a detailed record of their pain while ensuring physicians have the data needed to guide diagnoses, referrals, and prescriptions.
The concept reframes pain reporting from a static 1–10 scale into a descriptive snapshot that is faster for patients to complete, easier for physicians to interpret, and would strengthen the ongoing communication required for effective pain management.
Concept Visualization
