Funding Source
National Institute of General Medical Sciences,1R35GM165456-01
Project Period
8/5/2026 – 3/31/2031
Principal Investigator
Madelyn Frumkin, PhD (Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth)
Other Project Staff
Project Summary
Over 300 million surgeries are performed worldwide each year. Approximately 10-35% of surgical patients experience persistent post-surgical pain (PPSP), defined as new or worsening pain at the site of surgery lasting for 3 or more months. Despite recent progress in mechanistic understanding of pain, prevention of PPSP remains difficult. A key challenge is the current lack of validated biomarkers that can reliably predict risk, guide treatment selection, or monitor recovery of postoperative pain.
Over the next 5 years, the Frumkin Lab will develop and validate digital biomarkers of postoperative pain using intensive longitudinal data collected via smartphones and wearable devices. We will leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches for feature extraction and evaluate the utility of these features for predicting PPSP. We will additionally leverage multimodal data collected postoperatively to identify behavioral (e.g., sleep, physical activity) and psychosocial (e.g., mood, anxiety, social connection) factors that drive postoperative pain fluctuations. Together, these research areas will facilitate more accurate identification of patients at risk for PPSP and greater understanding of modifiable biopsychosocial mechanisms.
Public Health Relevance
As the number of surgeries increases both nationally and globally, PPSP is becoming a major public health problem associated with poor quality of life, inability to return to work, and significant healthcare costs. More accurate prediction models can be used to enrich clinical trial samples when testing new intervention strategies, resulting in improved statistical power and more efficient trials. Our long-term goal is to integrate multimodal digital health data into a larger digital ecosystem that identifies patients at risk of PPSP, provides data-driven insights into mechanisms of risk, and links patients with effective preventative measures (e.g., digital interventions).