Medasense’s finger probe makes pain management easier for anesthesiologists
04 Oct 2023
Pain management is vital to patient comfort and treatment success in medical care. Effective pain management alleviates suffering and optimizes medical outcomes, particularly surgical procedures. However, existing methods for gauging and addressing pain have significant limitations.
Medasense Biometrics is a commercial-stage pain management technology company that develops AI-powered patient monitoring solutions to help clinicians manage physiological pain. The company’s mission is to personalize and optimize pain treatment to reduce patient suffering from pain and its side effects.
Galit Zuckerman-Stark, an engineer with a background in high tech and a love for science and technology, founded Medasense almost 15 years ago. With her expertise in AI, she saw an opportunity to provide better objective tools for clinicians to personalize pain treatment.
“The issue of pain during surgery and post-surgery and pain in general is a big issue with limited tools to assess them. [The pain scale chart is] all smiley faces,” Zuckerman-Stark said in an interview with Medical Design & Outsourcing.
In conscious patients, current approaches often rely on subjective assessments of pain, which can be influenced by individual perception and expression, leading to potential delays in intervention and inconsistent care. During surgery the anesthetized patient experiences physiological responses to painful stimuli — nociception in medical terms. Current techniques to assess the level of nociception have relied on indirect parameters. The opioid crisis has underscored the urgent need for alternatives to conventional pain management.
Medasense has a mission to revolutionize pain management through its technology. The company’s AI-driven algorithms promise to provide a more objective and real-time assessment of pain levels during times when the patient cannot convey the level of pain they are in. Currently focused on pain management during surgery (nociception), Medasense’s technology offers clinicians actionable data to inform their perioperative pain management decisions. MedaSense aims to enhance patient care, reduce opioid reliance and improve surgical outcomes.
How Medasense’s technology works
Medasense says its approach is robust and adaptable, unlike other commercial solutions, and able to work in various scenarios and with different patient populations.
Medasense’ pain monitoring solution uses physiological parameters and derivatives to analyze the non-linear relationship between them using AI, creating a unique pain signature for each patient. This allows for a personalized approach to pain monitoring, considering factors like medication, surgery type and individual patient response.
“For one patient, it might be one set of parameters; for the other, it could be another set. This is extremely important, especially in the operating room,” Zuckerman-Stark said. “You have certain scenarios where certain medications affect certain physiological parameters.”
For example, if a patient is taking a medication that affects heart rate, then using the heart rate parameter to measure pain won’t work well in surgical procedures. Medasense’s algorithms find the parameters that work best, Zuckerman-Stark said.
Medasense’s flagship device, the PMD-200, uses the company’s Nociception Level Index (NOL), a technology used to monitor a patient’s pain level during surgery. The PMD-200 has a finger probe connected to the patient and monitors different physiological responses to pain, including pulse waves, sweating, movement and peripheral temperature changes. The data collected by the probe is analyzed to produce a number between zero and 100 for the pain level the patient is experiencing.
The NOL technology is wired to a bedside monitor in the operating room, which displays the patient’s index number. The threshold for intervention is set at 25, which means that if the patient’s index number is above 25 for more than 60 seconds, the anesthesiologist should consider giving more medication.
“They see the whole picture, but now they have to be a bit more sensitive and specific information about the pain that can help them make different decisions compared to the information they had before,” Zuckerman-Stark said.
One feature of the NOL technology is that it provides more sensitive and specific information about a patient’s pain (nociception) level than traditional vital sign monitors, Medasense says. Traditional monitors may not detect physiological responses to pain early enough, leading to delayed intervention or pain management.
The NOL monitoring also helps differentiate between pain and other physiological responses, such as changes in heart rate and blood pressure due to medication or surgical manipulation. The company says this real-time data gives surgeons and anesthesiologists the ability to fine-tune anesthesia and pain medications to precisely match the patient’s needs. It minimizes the risk of undermedication, which can lead to patient discomfort, or overmedication, which can result in complications, Zuckerman-Stark said.
Beyond the operating room, Medasense’s pain monitoring solution has broader implications for critical care. In intensive care units, for example, it could assist in managing pain for patients who may be unable to communicate their discomfort, such as those under sedation or on ventilators. The system’s real-time feedback ensures that pain management remains tailored to the patient’s condition, preventing unnecessary suffering and complications.
Medasense’s PMD-200 pain monitoring technology has been met with enthusiasm and interest from the medical community, particularly among early adopters who recognize its potential to revolutionize pain management, Zuckerman-Stark said. It is currently used in Europe, Canada, Australia, Israel, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Latin America. It can work alone or connected to Philips and Mindray patient monitors.
Its integration into medical practice has garnered attention for its ability to provide objective and real-time pain assessment, Zuckerman-Stark said.
“We see how it moves from that very specific early adopter into the rest of the [care] team who realizes that there is information that is helpful that they didn’t have before or they couldn’t see. They say, ‘We were blind in a way, and now we have it, so we can’t go back,'” she said.
According to the company, clinical studies and economic analyses have demonstrated that the system results in 33% less postoperative pain, 80% fewer hypotensive events, and a return on investment within the first year of use.
What does the future hold at Medasense?
The recent FDA de novo approval of Medasense’s technology is a significant milestone for the company.
Medasense is setting its sights on an ambitious future, with plans to expand the commercial use of its innovative pain monitoring technology in the U.S. and other global markets.
Medasense is actively looking to collaborate with partners across the medical and technology sectors to refine and expand their technology capabilities. Medtronic Patient Monitoring distributes Medasense’s technology in Europe.
“We have a very good collaboration with Medtronic,” Zuckerman-Stark said. “There is a strong clinical synergy with the other patient monitoring solutions that they provide in the perioperative space.”
The company also envisions a future where its technology can seamlessly integrate into wearable devices and home monitoring solutions. This would allow individuals to monitor and manage their pain levels in real time, giving them greater control over their healthcare and well-being.
The company’s pipeline includes the NOLedge pain management solution for home-based care. It gives patients objective feedback on individual pain trends and therapy progress, improves self-management and treatment compliance and helps regulate patient anxiety, according to Medasense, while care providers get accurate information for effective decision-making accessible remotely, streamlining pain care.
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