If you frequently experience pain with different intensity levels across your body, you are in luck. We have designed Chronic Pain Tracker to accommodate this common situation within the \"Pain Painter\" interface. This is probably easiest to describe with an example.
Let's say you've got intense low back pain at around an 8/10 plus less severe shoulder pain at 4/10 and a minor tingle in your right foot at 2/10. Typically your doctor or care provider is going to want to know about all of these conditions, but the key number asked for is the maximum pain level experienced. In this case, it is the low back pain at 8/10. So we would mark the pain scale at an 8.
Now, let's open up the Pain Painter interface and document each of these conditions. We have designed each of the four colors in the palette to correspond to a different percentage of the pain level indicated based on the chart to the left. The Red and Purple represent 100% of the pain level, and then Orange is 50% and Yellow is 25%. These figures become important when we start to create the composited pain map images for the report section. We'll return to this in a moment.
So let's paint the pain map for this user. As you can see we used the appropriate colors for each of the pain locations based on the amount of pain being experienced. Knowing that the colors represent different pain intensity values makes it easy to view this pain map and know where you're hurting most (and least).
As for the compositing operation which generates the Summary Report's body images, it uses your paintings and combines them into an image which should represent your primary pain areas for the report period. It does this by treating the Red and Purple areas as the most intense pain and then the Orange as 50% of that intensity and Yellow as 25% of the intensity. Without this adjustment, the composited pain map may show a right foot as having the same pain level as the low back, although we know they should be different.
You may ask why Red and Purple are both 100%. We found that some people wanted to mark at least 2 areas as having the \"max\" pain. With 2 colors they can also refer to those sites in the description more easily (eg. I was feeling extreme tightness in the Red areas, while the Purple areas felt like they were on fire).
Still another approach is to use the colors to describe a pain that radiates outward from a specific location and grows weaker with distance. The second sample screenshot shows this approach. The purple and red markings are showing a focused right shoulder problem as well as sciatica running from the low back down the left leg. The pain fades from red to orange to yellow which suggests that the pain is being felt in a significant portion of the body, but mainly at the centralized locations.
Ultimately though, its up to you to use these tools in the manner they fit your situation the best. We hope these examples have given you some ideas for how you can use the Pain Painter to create a visual diary of your pain. If you have additional requirements, please let us know and we'll try to work them in.