Program

Dr. Serena Moscato

Bio

Serena Moscato, PhD, is a biomedical engineer and Assistant Professor at the University of Bologna, Italy. Her research focuses on wearable sensing, physiological signal processing, and machine learning for the development of digital biomarkers. In particular, her work investigates the use of wearable sensors for real-world pain assessment and cardiovascular monitoring. She also has experience in medical informatics and data management for clinical studies, including electronic data capture, clinical data standardization, interoperability, and health data infrastructures. Her work aims to bridge signal processing, clinical research, and digital health to support more objective, reliable, and personalized health monitoring.

Talk title

Beyond the Clinic: Wearable Sensors for Real-World Pain Assessment

Abstract

Pain assessment still relies mainly on subjective self-reports and occasional clinical evaluations, which may miss its dynamic and context-dependent nature. Wearable sensors can move assessment beyond the clinic by continuously monitoring physiological signals in real-world settings. This talk will present examples from clinical and ecological studies using wearable data to characterize pain-related patterns, monitor daily and overnight changes, and support automatic pain-state classification. It will also discuss key pitfalls, including signal non-specificity, contextual and clinical confounders, motion artifacts, missingness, and fragmented recordings, highlighting the need for quality-aware, context-aware, and robust analytical approaches to obtain a reliable automatic real-world pain assessment tool.

Professor Francesco Cutugno

Bio

Francesco Cutugno is an Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy. His research interests center on speech perception and recognition in humans and machines, as well as multimodal and spoken dialogue systems. He served as President of the Italian Association for Speech Sciences (AISV) from 2013 to 2018, and currently directs the Urban/Eco research center, dedicated to AI applications in fields such as Cultural Heritage, Architecture, and Automatic and Multimodal Dialogue Systems. Since 2020, together with Marco Cascella, Marta Maffia, and other colleagues, he has been collecting interviews with oncological patients as part of a study on the Automatic Assessment of Pain.

Talk title

Remembering, Feeling, Naming: Multimodal and Textual Approaches to Pain Representation in Cancer Patient Narratives

Abstract

The central aim of the project I will present is to analyze interviews with patients who are not experiencing pain at the time of recording. The interview protocol is designed to elicit a range of affective and cognitive states in participants through targeted questioning. The resulting utterances span several categories: pain-neutral expressions, retrieved memories of acute or breakthrough pain episodes, accounts of joyful moments unrelated to the illness, and metaphorical expressions capturing the perceived essence of pain. Alongside the interviews, biological data were collected via sensors, and the sessions were video-recorded. The resulting multimodal dataset is being analyzed by an interdisciplinary team comprising bioengineers, psychologists, physicians, and linguists. My talk will present preliminary results addressing two complementary strands of the broader project. The first concerns the multimodal analysis of the video recordings, structured along three dimensions: facial expression, vocal attitude, and textual content. The second offers a more focused examination of the textual data, presenting initial attempts to automatically classify the produced utterances using different models of abstract pain representation.

Dr. Maria Pia Riccio

Bio

Maria Pia Riccio, MD, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Child Neuropsychiatry at the Federico II University of Naples and carries out clinical activities in the Child Neuropsychiatry Department of the Federico II University Hospital of Naples and is consultant for the Pediatrics Unit at the Federico II University Hospital. Her primary clinical and scientific interests include neurodevelopmental disorders, psychopharmacology and adolescent psychopathology .

Talk title

Pain perception and neurodevelopmental disorders: clinical issues and future perspectives. 

Abstract

Abnormal pain reactivity is often reported by the parents of children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD), other neurodevelopmental disorders and syndromic conditions. This is related to some neurochemical findings frequently reported in autism and to impairment of modulate genes involved in nociceptive circuitry. Autistic people may react paradoxically to particular sensory stimuli. Sometimes they are oblivious to pain, while patients with cerebral palsy, experience pain more frequently from musculoskeletal, neurological and gastrointestinal sites. Also sleep problems are estimated in 18–37% of children with neurodevelopmental disorders and might correlate with pain. In general, complex bidirectional pain and other clinical symptoms exists and might exacerbate pain by lowering pain thresholds. However, alterations of autonomic responses, irritability, facial expressions were not used to express pain in every conditions, but also other manifestations might be observed (e.g., teeth grinding, aggressiveness, etc.).  Such abnormal pain reactivity is often reported by the parents, but it is difficult to measure, especially in subjects presenting language compromission and intellectual disability associated. Finding useful tools to objectify the presence of pain and stabilize its intensity level represents a fundamental objective for identifying therapeutic objectives and treatment tools that can be customized for each patient, improving the quality of life.

.