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nature of the human body. Thus, patients are unable to visually express the pain that
they are experiencing, as statements of the form “
I
have a pain on the inside of my
thigh
” are not easily captured in a 2-D pain drawing.
While recent inventions of medical imaging techniques such as computerized to-
mography and magnetic resonance imaging have revolutionized radiology, the devel-
opment of 3-D imaging has not yet been ported across the world of pain drawings.
Finally, it is natural that the patient wants to be regularly informed of their health
situation, and the doctors on their part to be able to monitor their patients' medical
situation, therefore to both have easy and relatively fast access to such health informa-
tion, avoiding situations such as hospital queues. Thus, in overall, there are appear to
be several limitations in the current back pain assessment practices that had led re-
searchers to consider ways of improving the effectiveness of these techniques.
1.3 A Statement of the Problem
To this end, the purpose of this work is therefore, to establish whether the improve-
ment of the existing back pain assessment techniques has an impact on the ways in
which back pain patients are treated. If these improvements can be shown as an effec-
tive way of also improving the quality of their treatment, then this could be a signifi-
cant finding, given the large numbers of back pain sufferers in worldwide and the
amount of money and resources spend to deal with this chronic condition.
Consequently, the questions arising from this problem identified is what impact
does the improvement of the current back pain assessment techniques have on the
ways in which back pain patients are treated? Does it comprise an effective way of
improving the quality of their treatment?
Therefore, in its broadest form, this work aims to develop a prototype solution that
will be introduced as an effective improvement to the existing back pain measurement
methods and limitations, as well as identify if, and how this improvement in the cur-
rent diagnosis methods changes the way in which back pain patients are treated.
1.4 Summary
So, the focus of this work will be the augmentation of the traditional 2-D pain drawing
with a novel, computer-based, 3-D version--in the anticipation that electronic 3-D pain
drawings shall increase the ease with which patients record their own pain, as well as
providing a tool for pain data collection and monitoring for back pain clinicians.
Moreover, we will port the developed 3-D pain drawing to a personal digital assistant
(PDA) platform, and implement a wireless solution for mobile medical data collection.
Accordingly, the structure of this chapter is as follows. Section 2 provides a more
detailed overview of back pain assessment, while Section 3 describes the proposed
design, and consecutively the implementation of our prototype, and lastly, evaluations
as well as conclusions are drawn in Sections 4 and 5 respectively.
2 Back Pain Monitoring-A Review of the Literature
In the previous section we have already reviewed some relevant literature in the proc-
ess of outlining the background, significance, and importance of this proposed work.
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