From Sketch to Signal: Building a Digital Pain Drawing Tool

From Sketch to Signal: Building a Digital Pain Drawing Tool from Anatomical Illustration to Structured Clinical Data
Pain drawings are widely used in clinical practice, but their value depends on more than simply digitizing a paper form. In this talk, we present our digital pain drawing project from two connected perspectives: the development of an anatomically grounded, sex-neutral illustration and the implementation of a tool that transforms patient-reported pain markings into structured, analyzable data. Yanick Lukic describes the interdisciplinary design process behind the body chart, including iterative refinement with illustrators, anatomists, clinicians, psychologists, and technical developers, and discuss lessons learned about neutrality, anatomical accuracy, visual clarity, and user acceptance. We then show how this illustration became the basis of an interactive prototype that supports intuitive pain marking, region-level mapping, and integration with interoperable standards and terminologies such as FHIR and SNOMED CT. Finally, we discuss early evaluation results, the current prototype that is about to enter usability testing, and what this work suggests for patient-centered documentation, longitudinal tracking, and future data-driven pain assessment.

About Yanick Lukic
Dr. Yanick Lukic is a Lecturer and Senior Researcher in Human-Centered Computing at the ZHAW School of Engineering, working on digital health and human-centered technologies. He holds a PhD from ETH Zurich, where he specialized in developing and evaluating a gameful breathing training app. He is the founder of Codeklang GmbH and serves as an advisor to BreezeLabs AG.