The LabPsiTec laboratory of the UJI integrates a network of technologies to improve the treatment and experience of chronic pain in DolorTic.com

The Laboratory of Psychology and Technology (LabPsiTec) of the Universitat Jaume I has developed a comprehensive platform that brings together an innovative network of technologies for the treatment and improvement of the quality of life of people with chronic pain. The platform brings together the different applications and online managers developed and tested by LabPsiTec to ensure its effectiveness and usefulness and allows interconnecting all agents involved in the treatment of chronic pain, from patients to health personnel, organisations and family members.

«We have been developing different applications for the field of chronic pain for a long time, and we have finally been able to create a platform that integrates them all», explains Azucena García Palacios, researcher responsible for the project, also highlighting the effort made so that health professionals can use it in an autonomous form. “Until now, we used these applications in the field of research and, therefore, it was the research staff who handled the data. Now, we have created a platform for professionals, an interface created with usability criteria to be able to implement it in hospitals, so that professionals can work with all these applications”, she adds.

Dolortic.com includes a patient platform with three apps designed to improve the care of a person with chronic pain at different levels. On the one hand, the app for daily pain monitoring allows controlling pain, the associated symptomatology, the appearance of adverse effects, the use of rescue medicines or even the lack of adherence to treatment. On the other hand, the application for the daily monitoring of the activity keeps track of the patient's activity and relates it to their pain patterns. Third, the treatment app POET (Pain Online Emotional Therapy) offers to users strategies to manage chronic pain and other associated symptoms, in order to improve their emotional state and quality of life. All these tools, validated with empirical studies, can be used in a modular way, so that each patient uses only those that he or she needs.

Integral view in real time

The platform also has a section for healthcare professionals that offers a comprehensive view of the patient's data and his or her treatment in real time. In this platform, all the actions of the person with chronic pain are recorded and then presented in a single report, where the data and therapeutic alarms of the different ICTs that make up the network are received. Thus, health personnel can be aware at all times of symptoms, treatment adherence, use of rescue medicines, psychological aspects associated with pain, appearance of adverse effects, patient activity and progress related to online psychological treatment. In this way, explains García Palacios, “can make decisions or modify the treatment based on a detailed and daily assessment of the symptoms of each patient and detect more quickly cases in which the medication is not being effective, thus increasing the effectiveness of the treatment”.

The comprehensive care system, in addition to being useful for improving patient care and reducing the burden on professionals, allows, from the scientific point of view, to obtain an enormous amount of data efficiently through the network. “Through big data, all this information, always stored anonymously, can serve to pose additional theoretical challenges and improve the knowledge we have about chronic pain, its aetiology, evolution, interactions in treatment, comorbidity and influence and correlation with different psychological constructs”, explains the researcher.

The application patented by the UJI LabPsiTec can be useful for sectors such as the pharmaceutical industry dedicated to the development of more effective pain medications, and especially hospitals and centres dedicated to the care of patients with chronic pain.