Exploring Cardiac Responses of Pain and Distress

Abstract

Pain and distress stand at the intersection of multiple health crises and are leading contributors to disability. Current pain assessments rely on self-reports—which assume a capacity to understand and verbalize mental/emotional states—and behavioral observation which can be subject to limitations and misinterpretation. Methods to evaluate pain/distress can be substantially enhanced with biometrics that incorporate the physiological aspects of the full pain experience. This chapter explores how induced pressure pain influences cardiac activity elicited via the autonomic nervous system. We aim to uncover signatures in cardiac responses via personalized analysis of the frequencies and the timings of the heart’s inter-beat-interval. Autonomic responses such as cardiac activity serve as inevitable processes, which cannot be volitionally controlled—they exhibit a narrow range of dynamics, helping provide robust signatures of the body’s responses to pain/distress. We find that pain elicits shifts in the heart rate variability metrics of the cardiac signal, alluding to changes in sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system activation. Unique relationships are also observed between metrics obtained from the physiological data and self-reported pain ratings. The implications of this work are discussed in the context of precision medicine with possible applications in clinical populations such as autism.