Pain Studies Lab Research at the Annual Scientific Meeting of the Canadian Pain Society

Sep 03 2023
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Pain Studies Lab Research at the Annual Scientific Meeting of the Canadian Pain Society(CPS)

By | Study, Research, Conferences, Events

On May 10-12, 2023, members of the Pain Studies Lab presented two posters at the Annual Scientific Meeting of the Canadian Pain Society in Banff, Canada. The Canadian Pain Society connects healthcare professionals, scientists, researchers, policymakers, and people with lived experience through evidence-based education. Each poster articulates the results of scientific and clinical studies conducted by members of the Pain Studies Lab in collaboration with other organizations in British Columbia.

Poster 1: Diversity of Social Presence in VR

Yuemei Wu presented a poster about the Diverse Forms of Social Presence in VR for Chronic Pain in a number of our immersive virtual environments. “Social Presence” is often assumed to involve two users sharing the same Virtual Environment (VE), and each user inhabits an avatar communicating in real-time. However, we argue that other forms of social presence can be experienced in multiple ways for multiple purposes. For example, a number of our VEs have humanoid, animal or robotic characters who help users navigate or interact.

Wu Y, Chong K, Gromala D, Shaw C, Kagiri T, Williamson O,  Li R, Kim D, Hortsing S, Wilson M. Diverse Forms of Social Presence in VR for Chronic Pain.  In the Annual Scientific Meeting of the Canadian Pain Society, Banff, Canada, 10-12 May 2023.

Graduate student Yuemei Wu introduces the VEs to someone with lived experience.

Poster 2: Neuroscience: essential for the Design of VR for Chronic Pain

In this poster, neuroscientist Dr. Zahra Ofoghi demonstrates an intriguing method she developed to help partially automate structured reviews. Her approach also enables researchers to gain an immediate sense of interdisciplinary differences of the resulting research papers that met the search criteria. That a neuroscientist learns to integrate visualization apps for purposes of pain research may appear to be novel, we take pride in such interdisciplinary achievements, especially for knowledge translation that may be useful for others, building bridges across disciplines.  

Ofoghi Z, Gromala D, Kagiri T. Neuroscientific Implication for the Design and Development of Virtual Reality for Patients with Chronic Pain. In the Annual Scientific Meeting of the Canadian Pain Society, Banff, Canada, 10-12 May 2023

Bridging the Gap: Dr. Zahra Ofoghi’s Innovative Neuroscience Approach Unveiled in VR for Chronic Pain.

Title: Toward a collective understanding of chronic pain journeys through Perspectives of diverse healthcare professionals

Kit-Ying Angela Chong conducted a pre-research early investigative activity developed from a co-design and co-speculation course. The goal was to explore co-design methodologies and understand the barriers chronic pain patients may face from a healthcare professional or researcher’s perspective. The early investigative activity resulted in several learning outcomes. For instance, the journey map as an intervention tool in a conference setting was not as effective as expected, however, it was a successful conversation starter. Angela planned to iterate the activity and further develop it into a research study that contributes to the chronic pain community.

Unveiling Insights: Kit-Ying Angela Chong Explores Chronic Pain Journeys from Diverse Healthcare Perspectives.

May 10 2023
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Chronic Pain Research Institute appoints Design Director

By | Collaborations, Events, Lab Updates, Other News

New Design Director at the CP Research Institute

We are pleased to announce that our very own Tim, who has diligently served as a research assistant with us, has been appointed the Design Director of the Chronic Pain Research Institute!

Tim will actively work at the nexus of design, health, and technology in his new role. His key responsibilities will be to closely collaborate with a diverse team comprising health professionals, tech experts, design researchers, patient-partners, and international luminaries. Their collective goal? To metamorphose our invaluable research findings into easy-to-understand, accessible formats. This will span reports, visualizations, media narratives, comprehensive toolkits, and workshop instruments.

It is the ambition of our institute to relay our research in a manner that is both actionable and coherent. Under Tim’s guidance, we anticipate further enhancement in our efforts, not merely through our established digital platforms and publications but also innovative channels. It is imperative to Tim and all of us at the Pain Studies Lab that we remain cognizant of and sensitive to the lived experiences of individuals with chronic conditions.

To elucidate this approach, Mr. Tim will present at the forthcoming INFO+ 2023 conference scheduled this fall in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The Pain Studies Lab is excited about this new chapter, and we wholeheartedly believe that Tim’s design leadership will amplify our work and deeply enrich the lives of those we aim to serve.

Tim Kagiri, Design Director, CP Research Institute.

Nov 28 2022
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Pain Studies Lab Researchers present at the International Association on the Study of Pain’s (IASP) World Congress on Pain 2022 in Toronto

By | Research, Conferences

On Sept 19-23, 2022, members of the Pain Studies Lab presented two posters at the International Association on the Study of Pain’s (IASP) World Congress on Pain 2022 in Toronto. IASP World Congress is a multidisciplinary conference for frontline clinicians focusing on pain diagnosis, treatment and management. Each poster articulates the results of scientific and clinical studies conducted by members of the Pain Studies Lab in collaboration with other organizations in British Columbia.

Graduate student, Bhairavi Warke discussing a poster with at attendee at the IASP World Congress on Pain 2022.

Poster 1: Patient-Centered Approach to Researching Burdens of Pain

In collaboration with the Arthritis Research Centre of Canada (ARC) and the BC Support Unit, the Pain Studies Lab deployed participatory methods to effectively engage long-time patient-partners and members of the public in developing a web-platform. This web-platform uses a Citizen Science approach to explore the Burdens of Pain. The goal of this project is to invite citizens of British Columbia to contribute information about living with pain from their own experiences and be active members in advancing research in this area. The data collected will help foster a sense of community amongst people with shared experiences of pain and help researchers in identifying research questions that may need further investigation. This poster describes the patient-centered approaches that we used to include patient-partners and other end users in the development process as co-creators, participants and decision makers.
Warke B, Gromala D, Gupta A, Shaw C, and Li L. A Diverse Patient-Centered Approach to Researching Burdens of Pain: a Citizen Science project in British Columbia. In the International Association for the Study of Pain’s (IASP) World Congress on Pain 2022, Toronto, Canada, 19-23 Sep 2022

Graduate student, Pegah Kiaei presenting one of the posters at the the IASP World Congress on Pain 2022.

Poster 2: State-of-the-art review of commercial virtual reality applications

May 02 2022
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Arthritis Patients and We Win an Inaugural Ideator Award

By | Awards, Projects

In April, “four Canadian innovators received prestigious and valuable awards from the Arthritis Society to bring to life their solutions for fighting the fire of arthritis” — one is a project that Dr. Diane Gromala and Dr. Chris Shaw collaborate on with the Arthritis Research Centre (ARC), called OPERAS.

At the inaugural Arthritis Ideator Awards, Dr. Linda Li accepted the Olga Munari Arthritis Ideator Award for OPERAS at MaRS in Toronto. The award was based partly on the originality of the innovation, potential for significant and lasting outcomes for people with arthritis, and readiness for market.

Left to right: Winners Michelle Laflamme and Alex Fuentes of KneeKG, Matthew Rosato of PROVA Innovations, Lianna Genovese of Guided Hands, and Linda Li of OPERAS.

In addition to the $50,000 grant, the Arthritis Ideator Program gives innovators access to expert advice from the Arthritis Society and the broader arthritis ecosystem as they continue to develop their innovations, as well as to people living with arthritis who can support testing or provide feedback through focus groups or surveys.

“Arthritis is a huge challenge looking for bold solutions and we want to support bright minds as they create those solutions,” says Trish Barbato, President and CEO of the Arthritis Society. “We are embracing innovation like never before because we believe it is key to changing the lives of the six million Canadians living with arthritis.”     

OPERAS is an app-based program to empower active self-care, capturing information on the go, and providing trends on symptoms, disease activity and treatments. Says creator Linda Li, “With OPERAS, people with arthritis can monitor disease activity, keep track of medications, create action plans and collect and display physical activity data through an integrated physical activity tracker. It gives a detailed picture to help users lead healthier, pain-free lives.” 

OPERAS described: https://arthritis.rehab.med.ubc.ca/ 

https://arthritis.ca/about-arthritis/arthritis-in-the-news/news/arthritis-society-awards-$200,000-in-first-ever-arthritis-ideator-awards

https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2022/04/22/2427551/0/en/Arthritis-Society-awards-200-000-in-first-ever-Arthritis-Ideator-Awards.html

Jan 14 2022
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Dr. Xin Tong Earns a Doctorate, Postdoc at Stanford, and Canada’s Bill Buxton Award

By | Research, Awards, Graduation

In 2021, the Pain Studies Lab member Dr. Xin Tong had 3 significant achievements:

  1. she earned her Ph.D.,
  2. was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship affiliated with the Pervasive Wellbeing Technology Lab at Stanford University, and
  3. was the recipient of Canada’s prestigious Bill Buxton Best Canadian HCI Dissertation Award.
    This award recognizes the most outstanding doctoral dissertation completed at a Canadian university in the field of Human-Computer Interaction.

The Pain Studies Lab’s most recent Ph.D. graduate is Dr. Tong, is currently an Assistant Professor in Computation and Design at Duke Kunshan University (DKU).

Dr. Tong’s dissertation, Bodily Resonance: Exploring the Effects of Virtual Embodiment on Pain Modulation and the Fostering of Empathy toward Pain Sufferers, combined both technical and human aspects of research to explore how virtual embodiment — through the use of VR technology — can affect people’s perception of pain and address the biological, psychological and social challenges that chronic pain patients face. This work identifies factors that impact the effect of VR embodiment on pain, including features of avatars, combinations of multiple modalities to communicate pain, and the integration of narratives into games.

Findings from Dr. Tong’s studies led to a series of important design recommendations for using embodied VR to generate empathy. Building on those results, Dr. Tong proposes Bodily Resonance, a design framework for pain and VR for empathy. The framework connects the real body that is in pain, the VR content, the illusion of presence in the virtual world and the narrative to mediate the perception of pain and empathy.

Sep 12 2021
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The Pain Studies Lab Responds to Ensure Access to COVID-19 Vaccinations

By | Study, Research, Collaborations

We responded to the call to help with COVID-related vaccination software, especially for vulnerable and at-risk people, such as those who live with chronic conditions. What also differentiated our system was its technical integration with Electronic Health Records (EHR).

As the researchers on a Canada-wide project funded by the Supercluster, MITACS, and the Digital Health Circle, we collaborated with health tech companies Cambian, IBM, LifeLabs, TickIt, Well Health, and the non-profit Providence Health Care.
Our job as researchers was twofold:

  1. to identify the real needs of people identified as “vulnerable and at-risk” &
  2. to ensure the system was as inclusive and usable as possible.

We built on our technical and design expertise in designing, building and testing health tech for people who live with long-term, chronic conditions, their caregivers and their healthcare professionals.

Our patient-centred approaches and our interests in inclusive, individualized healthcare enabled us to uncover many of the specialized contexts and needs that would have otherwise remained invisible. 

To interact with as many people as possible, we first contacted numerous non-profit organizations, interviewed their organizers and staff, and focused on in-depth interviews, usability studies and discussions with their many members.

Next, we conducted usability studies to make sure the vaccination scheduling system would be usable by those who are aging, immuno-compromised, differently abled, living in remote areas, living with chronic conditions, or who could only access the online system via mobile phones.

Clockwise: Dr. Diane Gromala, PhD students Bahiravi Warke, Xin Tong and MSc student Amal Vincent worked with people who are considered “vulnerable and at-risk” to severe illness from COVID-19 as identified by Canada’s and BC’s Ministry of Health. This included seniors, those who have cancer, are immuno-compromised, or have chronic conditions such as insulin-dependent diabetes, cardiovascular disease, kidney conditions, blood and rare diseases, significant developmental disabilities or require respiratory support.

Our discoveries:

    • the crucial and diverse roles of diverse caregivers (a family member, friend or neighbor);
    • the roles and centrality of extended families, especially among many people new to Canada;
    • important gender, cultural and linguistic differences; and
    • that ease-of-use is essential, not a mere luxury.

An unexpected outcome was developing a just-in-time, rapid response method to communicate the results of our research in an accelerated but scientifically trustworthy way.

Project focus and findings:

UXUI:
Needs Analyses
Usability Studies
Patient-centred Design
Inclusive Design

Jun 14 2021
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Frontiers in Virtual Reality: Virtual Reality in Medicine

By | Study, Publications

In addition to our longitudinal fMRI studies with chronic pain patients who use our immersive VR for months, we are also conducting EEG studies.

For example, Pegah Kiaei worked with neuroscience experts to develop an EEG study that will form the basis of her MSc thesis.

This study was published in the journal Frontiers in Virtual Reality: Virtual Reality in Medicine.

Although chronic pain does not have biomarkers per se, integrating EEG data in biopsychosocial research methods that pervade pain research may enable us to make inferences about patients’ brain states before, during and after using VR.

This is important because although hundreds of studies show that VR can have analgesic effects, we aren’t sure yet how and why that happens.

If you are a chronic pain patient living in the greater Vancouver area and you would like to participate in such studies, please email:
Dr. Zahra Ofoghi – zahra_ofoghi@sfu.ca

Kiaei Ziabari, S., Ofoghi, Z., A. Rodrigues E., Gromala, D. & Moreno, S. (2021). “Investigating the role of having an avatar in virtual reality on pain alleviation and embodiment in patients with pain using electroencephalogram: a neuroimaging protocol,” in Frontiers in Virtual Reality, Special Issue: Virtual Reality in Medicine. 10 January 2022  https://doi.org/10.3389/frvir.2021.775764

Dec 20 2020
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FitViz: How objective data affects physiotherapist-patient conversations for arthritis patients

By | Study, Research, Projects

Dr. Linda Li, Professor Harold Robinson/Arthritis Society Chair, Canada Research Chair, UBC & Arthritis Research Centre.

We developed a web application called FitViz. It allows physiotherapists and patients to use the physical activity data collected from Fitbit fitness trackers during consultations.

Next, we conducted a four-week study with 20 patients (inflammatory and knee osteo-arthritis arthritis) and 7 physiotherapists to evaluate the feasibility of FitViz, and understand the experiences of the physiotherapists and the patients.

We used semi-structured interviews to understand how physiotherapists used FitViz, and if and how it changed the nature of their consultation.

“Oh, I didn’t do a good job: How objective data affects physiotherapist-patient conversations for arthritis patients.”

We found that the use of objective data allowed the physiotherapist-patient conversations to be patient-driven, and allowed goals to be realistic and data-driven. However, the use of objective data also caused some patients to feel guilty, which has implications on the use of pervasive healthcare technology in clinical settings.

After iterative improvements, we initiated a larger, longitudinal study.

 

References:

Ankit Gupta, Tim Heng, Chris Shaw, Diane Gromala, Jenny Leese and Linda Li. 2020.
“Oh, I didn’t do a good job: How objective data affects physiotherapist-patient conversations for arthritis patients.”
Proceedings of the 14th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare.
Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 156–165. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3421937.3421991

Li LC., Feehan LM., Xie H., Lu N., Shaw C., Gromala D., Aviña-Zubieta JA., Koehn C., Hoens AM., English K., Tam J., Therrien S., Townsend AF., Noonan G., Backman CL. (2020). “Efficacy of a Physical Activity Counseling Program With Use of a Wearable Tracker in People With Inflammatory Arthritis: A Randomized Controlled Trial.”Arthritis Care & Research (Hoboken).
2020 Dec;72(12):1755-1765.    DOI: 10.1002/acr.24199.   PMID: 32248626 Clinical Trial.

Sep 13 2020
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Frontiers in Neurology publishes research results of VR work on Phantom Limb Pain

By | Research, Collaborations, Papers, Projects, Publications

“I Dreamed of My Hands and Arms Moving Again...”

Phantom limb pain (PLP) is a type of chronic pain that follows limb amputation, brachial plexus avulsion injury, or spinal cord injury. Treating it is a well-known challenge. Currently, virtual reality (VR) interventions are attracting increasing attention because they show promising analgesic effects. However, most previous studies of VR interventions were conducted with a limited number of patients in a single trial. Therefore, to investigate the effectiveness of VR interventions on patients’ phantom limb pain over time, PhD candidate Xin Tong and her supervisor Prof. Diane Gromala collaborated with Dr. Kunlin Wei from Peking University and Dr. Bifa Fan from the Chinese-Japan Friendship Hospital. They recruited five PLP patients who participated in multiple VR sessions over 6 weeks. In VR, patients “inhabited” a virtual body or avatar. Movements of their intact limbs were mirrored in their avatar, providing the illusion that their limbs responded as if both were intact and functional.
The researchers found that VR sessions repeated over time led to reduced pain — even in chronic pain that persisted for over 20 years — as well as improvements in anxiety, depression, and a sense of embodiment in the virtual body. Their findings also suggest that providing PLP patients with sensorimotor experiences involving the impaired limb in VR appears to offer long-term benefits for patients, and speculate that these benefits maybe related to changes in patients’ control of their phantom limb’s movement.
Future work to determine if such VR interventions may be detected in brain-imaging studies such as fMRI has been planned and recently funded.

Reference:

Tong, X., Wang, X., Cai, Y., Gromala, D., Fan, B., & Wei, K. (2020).
“I Dreamed of My Hands and Arms Moving Again”:
A Case Series Investigating the Effect of Immersive Virtual Reality on Phantom Limb Pain Alleviation”

Frontiers in Neurology, 11, 876.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2020.00876/full

Mar 10 2020
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Redefining Citizen Science: the Pain Studies Lab & the Arthritis Research Centre ‘In the Wild’

By | Study, Research, Collaborations

An innovative Citizen Science workshop led to a study ‘in the wild,’  an academic-industry initiative, and a province-wide initiative about ‘the burden of pain symptoms’ — a first.

Academic researchers—from the Arthritis Research Centre of Canada (ARC) and Simon Fraser University’s (SFU’s) Pain Studies Lab and BioV Lab—partnered with award-winning industry partner Tactica Interactive to develop a web portal for all citizens of British Columbia (BC). In November 2019, SFU researchers then subjected it to testing ‘in the wild’ of a result of a collaborative effort between ARC and SFU’s Pain Studies and BioV Labs that started with an innovative ‘design thinking’ workshop last April.

Objective: In the web portal, the research teams will ask all citizens of BC about how ‘the burden of pain symptoms’ might affect their lives, from their ability to sleep and function at work and in ‘ordinary, everyday life,’ to their quality of life.

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(Photos courtesy: D.Gromala, 2019)

Bhairavi Warke and Ankit Gupta, PhD students and researchers from the Pain Studies & BioV Labs at the School of Interactive Arts & Technology (SIAT) at SFU led the mall study. Researchers: Sherry Wang, Gary Li, Pegah Kaiei, Celia Zhang, Dr. Diane Gromala & Dr. Chris Shaw.

After months of working closely with Tactica Interactive on designing the web portal, the research teams did what tech professionals are taught to do: to test it with some of the people it was designed for — citizens. Such testing is an ideal. However, in industry, ‘user testing’ can be difficult because of its cost or time it requires, or both.

University researchers usually manage to conduct such studies, but more often than not, they’re conducted in a laboratory because labs offer tightly controlled conditions. Studies done ‘in the wild’ — outside of research labs — aren’t as tightly controlled, but they can reach a larger cross section of future ‘users.’ Because the web portal is meant for all citizens of BC, the researchers insisted on testing the web portal in a mall in Surrey.

Results: The web portal’s usability, acceptability, appropriateness, legibility and readability were tested by people in the mall who were generous enough to spend time using the website and answering researchers’ questions. The results were transcribed, analyzed and communicated to the web portal’s designers and to the research teams.

Stay tuned: The web portal is now scheduled to launch in May 2020.