Assessing Symptom and Mood Dynamics in Pain Using the Smartphone Application SOMA

Trial statusRecruiting
Trial phaseNot listed
Trial typeObservational
Biological sexAll
Age18+
SponsorBrown University

About this trial

This study relies on the use of a smartphone application (SOMA) that the investigators developed for tracking daily mood, pain, and activity status in acute pain, chronic pain, and healthy controls over four months.The primary goal of the study is to use fluctuations in daily self-reported symptoms to identify computational predictors of acute-chronic pain transition, pain recovery, and/or chronic pain maintenance or flareups. The general study will include anyone with current acute or chronic pain, while a smaller sub-study will use a subset of patients from the chronic pain group who have been diagnosed with chronic low back pain, failed back surgery syndrome, or fibromyalgia. These sub-study participants will first take part in one in-person EEG testing session while completing simple interoception and reinforcement learning tasks and then begin daily use of the SOMA app. Electrophysiologic and behavioral data from the EEG testing session will be used to determine predictors of treatment response in the sub-study.

Eligibility criteria

Qualifiers

Age above 18

Access to a personal smartphone and a stable internet connection

Average pain intensity score of greater than 3 in the past week or

Average pain interference score of greater than 3 in the past week or

Disqualifiers

recent injury or surgery unrelated to the pain in the past 3 months

difficulty participating for technical/logistical issues (e.g., no computer, incompatible smartphone, can't commit to 4 months study participation);

Not fluent in English (difficulty understanding questions)

Current primary or metastatic cancer (organic cause of pain)

Trial design

Treatments tested in this trial

  • SOMA pain manager smartphone application

Treatment groups

800 Participants
are divided into 3 treatment groups

Sponsors and collaborators