Acquisition of a pain protocol from patients with neurostimulators

Nevro develops and sells neurostimulators for the spinal cord which get implanted. These stimulators help patients that have chronic pain. At the moment the patients have to fill out a table five times a day with their actual pain sensation, for the body parts with chronic pain. The pain is measured on the VAS-Scale (visual analogscale). On this scale “0“ is no pain and “10“ is very heavy pain. The table is filled out by hand by the patients and then a Nevro employee transfers them to an Excel sheet. This process should now get optimized with electronic utilities. Because a lot of patients do not fill these tables properly. So the idea is to create an incentive for the patients, so they fill them out on a regular base. The patients should get a smartphone which is running the Nevro application and so that they can enter their pain sensation. Most of the patients are in the higher age, so the application should be simple enough, so they get used to it in a short time.

To achieve these goals, all components have to be developed from the ground up. The components are the server, the smartphone application and the admin website. For the communication with the clients the server offers a RESTful web service. The smartphone applications is developed for the Android platform and runs on all common versions. This means Android 2.2 and higher. The GUI on the smartphone application is very simple and reduced to the bare minimum, so the patients get not confused and don’t have to find out how to enter their data. To view the entered data and create new users by the Nevro employees, they can use the administration website. When they start the site, first they can search for a patient. After one was selected, all data which the patient entered is visualised in a table.