Persistent Pain Management Prize Millions of people live in persistent pain; what if they didn’t have to?
The problem It is estimated 1 in 5 Americans live with persistent pain 1, while in the UK the number could be as high as 1 in 22. It is pain that carries on for longer than 12 weeks despite medication or treatment3. Pain flares are unpredictable and a major issue for people living with the condition. It is often unclear what triggers a flare and what impacts their frequency and severity, with the condition unique to each individual. As a flare occurs, managing that pain can prove extraordinarily difficult, severely impacting a person’s quality of life and wellbeing. When long-term medication is ineffective – or as is highlighted by the opioid epidemic in the USA, undesirable – sufferers of persistent pain deserve the option of non-pharmacological solutions to predict flares and manage them when they occur.
Why a challenge prize? A challenge prize to unlock solutions for people living with persistent pain will deliver innovations that help individuals anticipate a flare up and predict their severity. This would help a person manage their day, allowing them to take charge over their condition rather than living at the mercy of it. It could be accomplished by tracking information, such as real-time biometric, environmental and behavioural data, to observe and identify patterns that would alert an individual to better pain management strategies unique to them. The prize would incentivise and support the creation of new wearable devices, providing a non-invasive and non-pharmacological solution for the millions of people around the world living with persistent and chronic pain.
A £5 million prize to create breakthrough non-pharmacological technologies for managing persistent and chronic pain The Persistent Pain Management Prize will inspire persistent pain experts and people with lived experience to collaborate with technology and product design partners to turn clinical research into real-world products for people living with chronic pain. It would incentivise existing innovators in the field of biofeedback and wearable devices to apply their ingenuity to new opportunities to manage a condition that impacts people in many different ways. The science, technology and design required to create biofeedback solutions – such as wearable devices, biometric sensors, machine learning and novel behavioural science approaches – are rapidly developing, not least for consumer lifestyle trackers. Innovators need the right incentive to apply these approaches to medical devices that increase the quality of life for millions. The Persistent Pain Management Prize will bring together a global network of innovators and talent to unlock a new category of technologies for managing persistent pain.
1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/the-big-number-502-milli on-people-live-with-chronic-pain-in-the-us/2021/06/03/94a9e94c-c493-11eb-8c18-fd53a628b992_story.html 2
https://cks.nice.org.uk/topics/chronic-pain/background-information/prevalence/#:~:text=Between%20one%2Dthird%20and%20one,a re%20affected%20by%20chronic%20pain. 3
https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng193/chapter/Context