Physiological and behavioral profiling for nociceptive pain estimation using personalized multitask learning

Pain is a subjective experience commonly measured through patient’s self report. While there exist numerous situations in which automatic pain estimation methods may be preferred, inter-subject variability in physiological and behavioral pain responses has hindered the development of such methods. In this work, we address this problem by introducing a novel personalized multitask machine learning method for pain estimation based on individual physiological and behavioral pain response profiles, and show its advantages in a dataset containing multimodal responses to nociceptive heat pain.