Designing a prototype interface for visual communication of pain.

Thousands of people use Online Health Communities (OHCs) as a forum for expressing and collaborating on symptoms of pain. Despite the physical nature of pain, these exchanges typically comprise text. While pain referral diagrams have served as patient-physician communication aids for decades, little research has focused on translating them into an interactive digital interface. We propose that such an interface would provide a more efficient and accurate mechanism for expressing pain and would facilitate useful discussion around pain symptoms. In this work-in-progress, we present a pilot study in which users expressed physical symptoms using pen and paper. Our results uncovered several design considerations that are currently being used to inform the design of Body Diagrams, an interactive pain visualization tool that we plan to deploy to a pain-related OHC in the near future.