Using Automatic Facial Expression Analysis as a Tool to Long Term Evaluation in Fibromyalgia Patients

Fibromyalgia is a chronic disease manifested with generalized pain. The patients with fibromyalgia are usually associated with a variety of symptoms such as sleep disturbance, daytime fatigue, cognition difficulty, other somatic symptoms, depression and anxiety etc. Because there is no available specific biomarker to evaluate fibromyalgia severity currently, it still replies on patients’ subjective description in clinical evaluation and follow up. Facial expression has been found to be highly linked to general health condition and disease. Facial action codding system (FACS) is a validated system, developed to objectively coding for human facial expression. Studies showed FACE is a powerful tool in neuroscience, psychology and evaluating clinical conditions such pain evaluation in children, cognitive deficit and critical conditions. Automatic analysis based on facial recognition algorithm has been proposed in FACS analysis and yields good results. Nevertheless, there are still scanty studies applying automatic FACS in clinical long-term follow up for specific disease. Disease monitoring model based on mobile phone gaining promising results in recent years. Using mobile phone as a mediator to assist clinical management has advantages of convenience and familiarity to the patients. Present project including two major researches. The first-year project aims to establish the validity of FACS analysis in evaluation of fibromyalgia. Comparison between fibromyalgia patients and controls in FACS analysis will be conducted. Furthermore, correlation analysis among the parameters of FACS and symptoms group of fibromyalgia will be performed. The data obtained from this year will serve as data bank for next year project. The second-year project aims to develop the mobile-based system to perform long term daily-base follow up in fibromyalgia. The mobile app will incorporate with FACS analysis via mobile cam. Present project can serve a FACS data bank in Chinese population of fibromyalgia. In addition, the mobile phone based model will be useful for further clinical applications.