Anaesthesia
Johan Ræder, Chief consultant and Professor, Dept of Anaesthesiology, Oslo University Hospital.
Statement on the PainMonitor© and professor Hanne Storm MD.PhD the CEO and founder of Med-Storm Innovation AS:
“I have known and collaborated with Hanne Storm for the last 17-18 years. We have mutual responsibility of five Medline registered original research papers and one PhD student.
Hanne Storm is an exceptionally innovative, efficient and hard working researcher; she has done her research in parallel with tutor work for medical students and successful development of business and certification work on her own patency on the stress measure device, Pain Monitor.
She has been the main supervisor for one PhD candidate and has numerous collaboration projects with leading scientists in Norway and internationally.
She has exceptional qualities in hypotheses generation, in getting collaboration from other research groups, and in making complex and tough projects into realities.
She is also a very pleasant person to collaborate with; always friendly, open-minded and listening but still consistent in getting results and conclusions from whatever she is into.
The PainMonitor is a unique and very promising tool for evaluation and objective (quantitative) measurement of nociceptive stimulation, which is reported as pain in the awake patient. As pain is a subjective experience based on nociceptive input in combination with psychological mechanisms, it is very hard to measure directly, but a lot of surrogate tools have been developed, such as EEG devices, pupillometry, pletysmograhy, etc.
The unique feature of the PainMonitor is the sophisticated calculation of sweat bursts, which correlates very well with nociception and pain in many patient models tested: general anaesthesia, pediatric/neonatal care, post-operative pain, intensive care, pain during sedation, etc.
Compared to other devices the response is very rapid, non-influenced by use of most drugs, cheap, non-invasive and now commercially available.
Still, there is a huge potential in developing this simple and objective tool into something that could be a routine part of monitoring all patients during surgery or intensive care.
As more than 1 out of 7-8 persons in the Western world is subjected to this kind of care during an average year, there is a great commercial potential for the PainMonitor in such a context.”
Oslo, February 22nd 2018
e-mail: johan.rader@medisin.uio.no
Ph: +47 922 49 669
Intensive care
Prof. Peter Sackey MD. PhD.DESA.EDIC, Head of the Neuro Intensive Care unit, Karolinska University hospital, Stockholm:
“Acute pain remains a major problem in healthcare institutions, with both under-treatment and overtreatment leading to serious consequences, including increased risk of persistent pain states, impaired rehabilitation, prolonged length of stay and/or hospital readmission. Adverse events related to excessive analgesic use, such as over-sedation with respiratory depression and even death may also occur when pain and analgesia is poorly monitored and managed.
These adverse effects of poorly monitored and managed pain may be particularly common in hospitalised, poorly communicating adults and children. During their course of illness, they often undergo invasive diagnostic procedures that may be painful e.g. wound dressing, bone marrow aspiration, lumbar puncture, biopsies and arterial catheterization. The Skin Conductance Algesimeter (SCA) (Med-Storm Innovation) can easily be monitored continuously in the ICU in the same fashion as other monitoring methods, such as oxygen saturation and ECG, providing daily information as to the well-being of these vulnerable patients.
There is an unmet need for consistent and quantifiable pain assessment and treatment, which is mandated by the recommendations of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) in the US and of similar bodies in Europe. I believe that the SCA has potential to contribute as a tool in poorly communicating patients in the complex area of pain monitoring and management.”
Stockholm, August 2017
Phone: +46 70-771 03 64
Email: peter.sackey@ki.se
Neonatology
Prof. Richard Sindelar MD.PhD, Neonatolgist, Academic University hospital, Uppsala:
“Skin Conductance Algesimeter (SCA) is a method to assess stress and pain, and has a potential advantage of being an objective and continuous pain/stress monitoring device, especially in patients that cannot communicate their level of pain or stress, especially in an environment of intensive care, both in adults and children. To assess pain is especially important in newborn term and preterm infants where neglecting stressful events and procedures has been shown to have long term effects on neurodevelopment with increased morbidity and in some instances even mortality. All efforts should be made to reduce pain and stress in these patients, and assessing objectively the different procedures that can be painful or stressful for these patients gives the possibility to evaluate different medical and non-medical treatments. SCA has the potential to be applied continuously in all neonatal intensive care units in the same fashion as other monitoring such as oxygen saturation and ECG, supplying daily information as to the well-being of these the most vulnerable patients.”
Uppsala, January 2019
Phone: +46 18-611 96 27
Email: richard.sindelar@kbh.uu.se