Play the Pain

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

Some realities

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

These realities are why we are developing Play the Pain.

We have envisioned Play the Pain to become

A digital citizen’s laboratory to empower patients to evaluate the efficacy of behavioral and creative therapies that help cope with pain.

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.