For years at Orchard Care Homes, a 23facility dementia-care chain in northern England, Cheryl Baird watched nurses fill out the Abbey Pain Scale, an observational methodology used to evaluate pain in those who can't communicate verbally. Baird, a former nurse who was then the facility's director of quality, describes it as a tickbox exercise where...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. AI is changing how we quantify pain Researchers around the world are racing to turn pain-medicine's most subjective vital sign-into something a camera or sensor can score as reliably as blood pressure. The...