Play the Pain is a playful mHealth platform, designed to put chronic pain patients and their caregivers at the heart of pain research.

 

  • Chronic pain (CP) is a debilitating public health concern, affecting one in five Canadians.
  • Many factors (like age, gender, socioeconomic status, even culture) impact vulnerability to suffering chronic pain.
  • Researchers, clinicians, pharmacists, even policy-makers acknowledge that it is very difficult to quantify and qualify pain.
  • Clinicians acknowledge that chronic pain needs to be treated in a personalized manner.
  • For this reason, the Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research (SPOR) is now a governmental priority.

 

 

We have envisioned Play the Pain to become

A digital citizen's laboratory to empower patients to communicate their pain and their coping methods, as they live with pain.

 

 

Our core team members are Dr Najmeh Khalili-Mahani (Principle Investigator)  Dr Tristan Glatard, Computer and data scientist (Co-investigator); Dr Mathieu Roy, Neuropsychologist and Clinical Pain Researcher (co-investigator); Chris Salter, Digital Media Artist and Qualified Self scholar (Collaborator), Bart Simon, Social Scientist (Collaborator), Rosanna Maule, Film and Media Scholar (Collaborator), Marie-Paule Grimaldi, Poet and Activist (Advisor), Sandra Woods, bioethicist (Patient Partner).

Play the Pain App is designed to allow patients document the playful and creative ways in which they cope with pain; and to gather quantitative data that allows them to make observations about the efficacy of alternative treatments for pain.

Our interdisciplinary project aims to explore the ethical, practical and cultural tensions between lab-based research that focuses on medical conditions, versus data-driven research that focuses on self-monitoring and sharing of one's living conditions through digital health frameworks.

We welcome additional academic and industry partnerships. Please address your inquiries to Dr. Mahani (najmeh.khalili-mahani@concordia.ca)

 

Updates

Dec 2019: An early working prototype is available for testing on Android devices. Please contact us for more information.

Oct  2019: We held a two-day workshop in Concordia University's 4th Space.The event was open-to-all, and offered various art-therapeutic activities. and allowed us to discuss the ethical, practical and cultural tensions around the topic of digital healthcare, in the context of treating pain and related anxieties.
April 2019: Play the Pain: a ludic informatic platform for healing by creativity becomes the first project from Concordia University to receive the AUDACE grant.
April 2018: Capstone Project is completed and the first working prototype is launched.
March 2018: Play the Pain is shortlisted to receive the AUDACE grant.
December 2017 : Capstone students (Software Engineering) begin implementing the first prototype.June 2017: Sebastial Alvares receives a CUSRA award to develop Play the Pain.
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