Innovations in Pain Assessment for Older Adults: Bridging Gaps and Enhancing Care

Background

This research topic focuses on addressingthe pressing questions surrounding pain assessment in older adults, a crucial aspect of geriatric pain management. It invites recently conducted studies that sought to answerexploration into the current open questions and debates regarding the reliability, accuracy and efficacy of existing pain assessment tools for individuals with acute (e.g., post-surgical pain) and chronic pain (to include both cancer and non-cancer pain), as well as pain at the end of life. The topic encourages studies that employedinvestigation into innovative methodologies and technologies that are being developed to enhance pain evaluation, such as digital health tools and advanced imaging techniques. By addressing the challenges faced in accurately assessing pain in older adults, including cognitive impairments and communication barriers, this line of research could lead to significant improvements in clinical outcomes and quality of life for this rapidly expanding population. Engaging with these contemporary issues will provide valuable insights into the development of scalable and effective pain assessment protocols for use in clinical as well as non-clinical settings.

Goals

• Map strengths, limitations, and equity of existing instruments across diverse cognitive, sensory, linguistic, and cultural profiles, including dementia and delirium.

• Advance multimodal assessment that combines patient-reported outcomes with behavioral/communication signals, physiological and activity data, imaging, and functional measures.

• Evaluate AI-enabled and automated methods (computer vision for facial/body expressions, speech and language analytics, digital phenotyping via wearables and smartphones, and EHR/NLP pipelines) with attention to transparency, bias mitigation, and clinical utility.

• Develop and validate pain phenotypes and risk models capturing trajectories across perioperative, rehabilitation, oncology, primary care, specialty pain care, and palliative/end-of-life contexts.

• Optimize implementation: usability for clinicians and caregivers, workflow integration (telehealth, remote monitoring), interoperability with EHRs, and cost-effectiveness.

• Address disparities by adapting and validating tools across languages and cultures; incorporate social determinants of health and caregiver-reported outcomes.

Scope and Information for Authors

We welcome Original Research, Clinical Trials, Brief Research Reports, Methods, Protocols, Systematic and Mini Reviews, Perspectives, Opinions, Hypothesis & Theory, Case Reports, and Data/Technology Reports. Submissions may address:

• Age-appropriate tools for those with cognitive or sensory impairment

• Observer-based assessments (including dementia) and automated computer vision/speech approaches

• Remote, passive, and continuous monitoring (wearables, smartphones, smart homes) and telehealth-enabled workflows

• Multimodal fusion of PROMs, biomarkers, imaging, activity, and function; pain phenotyping and clustering

• NLP/EHR integration for documentation, automation, and decision support to reduce clinician burden

• Implementation and dissemination in hospitals, long-term care, primary care, rehabilitation, and home settings

• Disparities, cultural/linguistic adaptation, and social determinants of health

• Ethics, privacy, data governance, and human factors for AI in geriatric pain assessment

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review

Keywords: geriatric pain, pain assessment, cognitive impairment, digital health and AI, Pain phenotyping

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.