Mustafa Atee
Improving pain management amongst people with dementia

Award
2012 Viertel PhD Scholarship
Status
Completed
Start Date
1 January 2013
About the project
People with dementia may have pain but unable to report it because of impaired cognition. Therefore, we have developed a mobile application to assist caregivers and family members identify pain in dementia patients who cannot communicate. The app is integrated in a smart phone which uses the built-in camera to perform automated facial recognition together with certain pain indicators. To our knowledge this is a world’s first electronic pain assessment tool for dementia patients that utilises automated facial recognition technology and mobile platform with the view of reducing user subjectivity and hence more accurately detect pain. The next phase of this project is testing in human subjects and hence validating the electronic pain assessment tool.
Publications and presentations resulting from award
Mr Atee is currently completing his PhD Thesis and writing up papers. Mr Atee's research research project has recently was featured in the Australia on the 3rd December 2013 “Dementia patients to benefit from pain tool”
Where are they now?
Mr Atee is currently finalising his PhD thesis through Curtin University and aims to submit in mid 2015.