Direction
·A description of the practice setting, patient population, and applicant role in the organization
·A description of how PAINWeek can enhance pain management skills and knowledge, and how this knowledge can be used in a clinical setting
·A description of the barriers to pain management education/training that exist for the applicant
·Essays must address why a scholarship to PAINWeek would be a benefit
·Any other relevant points concerning the applicant's educational and professional goals
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My life goal is to use digital technology to make pain and palliative care more accessible. I believe that technology can supplement, rather than replace, humanized comprehensive care in order to address the megatrend of an aging society. My current project, dubbed I-PAIN, aims to create a home-based pain monitoring and counseling system based on machine learning. This project still needs input from multidisciplinary experts as well support from the government public health agency. I believe attending the PAINWEEK conference will be an opportunity for me to share experience, building the network, and importantly, raising the interest of public health agency in Thailand as well as internationally for home-based pain management technology that may change the way of caring for the pain to more comprehensive while less time-consuming. As a Neurologist working at a medical referral center in Chiang Mai Thailand. The majority of my patients are in advanced stages of disease such as metastatic cancer, late-stage organ failure, late-stage neurodegenerative disease. These patients are frequently neglect for their pain and spiritual suffering. This inspired me and some of Family physician colleagues founded palliative care service which including inpatient consultation, 6-bed comfort care suites, out-patient clinic, and home visiting. The majority of our patients are low to middle-income elders living in rural alone or with a spouse while their children work in a different place. The current solution is to connect rural health agencies to help follow-up, however, some patients need an expert level of adjusting medication (e.g. pain with the comorbid neuropsychologic problem). Furthermore, the need for home-based pain reporting would become more prominent due to social distancing during COVID-19. This situation makes it difficult to follow up which caused a high rate of unplanned readmission due to uncontrolled pain or other distress symptoms. Therefore, we conducted an extensive review and found a very interesting paper (Kunz et al. PAIN 2019. 534-549 and Dildine PAIN 2019 1901-1902). we were motivated to utilize automated facial recognition as a personal identity and objective pain behavior assessment and decision-aid pain management to be a tool to enhance the capacity of rural health agencies. It is fortunate that I have colleagues from computer science and application technologists as a committed team. This project was a grant by seeding fund from the Thailand neurological society of Thailand. I also submit the initial result on the abstract entitled "Classify Elderly Pain Severity from Open-Source Automated Facial Analysis. A Study from the Innovative Pain Artificial Intelligence Network (I-PAIN) Data Reciprocity." for your consideration for the PAINWEEK scientific poster section. Currently, the phase II project - the developing platform has been granted by the Chiang Mai university's innovation support fund. However, the next step using in nation-wide health agency is challenging due to low interest from the government public health agency. I believe that awarding scholarships from the international acknowledge PAINWEEK may feedback and approval if the idea regarding home-based pain management technology is valuable. I also hope the chance of giving interview perspective about increasing accessibility for home-bounded elderly would gain public interest both for Thailand and internationally. Although I did not get this scholarship, I still plan to attend PAINWEEK in order to have a chance to discuss with respected pain experts. Their opinion would help me design a more feasible platform and better deal with public health strategies.
