Illuminate — A New Language for Pain

Pain is rich with nuance, context & meaning.

The experience of pain is not purely dictated by stimulus and response. In addition to biological & physiological factors, it is also influenced by psychology, behavior, social context and culture. These components play a role in how the brain interprets and modulates the signals it receives.

Language flattens the experience

Language is an imperfect tool to describe sensation. We rely on metaphors of weapons: stabbing, hammering, prickling, to describe pain. This creates a negative relationship with pain that only worsens its experience. Even then, pain cannot be wholly described, especially within a healthcare system facing burnout, where the time to listen to patient stories is scarce.

The pain scale turns it into a singular point.

How can we assign an objective measure to an inherently subjective experience?

A single point — pain reduced to one number

"English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry."

Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill

Pain is more than just a feeling neatly rated between 1 and 10. It holds important nuances in sensation, experience and meaning. The ways in which we describe pain and other symptoms today leaves these experiences susceptible to minimization, dismissal and misdiagnosis.

"Your pain is normal."

Endometriosis exemplifies how the system fails when it comes to pain.

1 in 10^[1,2]

Women experience endometriosis

9 years^[1]

Average diagnostic delay

The condition is characterized by intense cyclic and progressive pain, often misdiagnosed as period cramps or IBS. Most, if not all, women with endometriosis have been told at some point that their pain is 'normal'.

The system tells women that excruciating, nauseating pain is normal. Despite its prevalence, endometriosis has no effective cures. Nevertheless, getting just a diagnosis has been described as life-changing for the women that receive it, because their pain is finally validated, free from a system of medical gaslighting. But that diagnosis takes an average of 9 years. This cannot be explained by scientific slowness alone; it reflects systemic disbelief and a cultural pattern of ignoring and minimizing pain.

The 1-10 scale is definitely plays a role in this.

Pain is universal. The language to share it is not.

So what if this scale

Looked more like this?

What if there were ways to enable humans to access more nuanced, embodied representations of pain?

What if patient expression could become a diagnostic aid rather than a barrier?

What are ways to shift the experience of patient advocacy from a fight against the system to one of care and trust?

Pain needs a new language.

ILLUMINATE creates a new visual language for the communication and documentation of pain. It breaks down the dimensions of pain (spatial, temporal, movement, intensity, etc.) and allows users to pinpoint and map nuance in a way that words and numbers alone cannot. Different sensations have different qualities and meaning, each of which can be expressed and understood.

"The success of the physician's work will often depend on the acuity with which he, or she can hear the fragmentary language of pain, coax it into clarity, and interpret it."

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain

Preliminary Data

LAYERS

heaviness

radiating

brain fog

face discomfort

sharpness behind eye

Headache started as soon as I woke up, more than an hour ago. Head feels super heavy.

LAYERS

electric jolt

pressure ache

Sudden jolts of pain whenever I put weight on the arm. Happened while I was biking. Pretty intense for a few minutes then went away.

LAYERS

sharp twisting

jittery ache

tummy discomfort

cramps

Day 2 of my period. Did not want to get out of bed and wanted to stay scrunched into a ball. Had to take an advil.

"When I'm in pain, I have now a way to show to my doctors: this is what I felt on this day. I can draw it, and I can save it, and it's gonna be a good representation of what I felt on that day."

Patient — Suspected Endometriosis

"Seeing my pain represented in that way really made me think of it differently. I realized it's a part of me and I should be taking care of it more."

Patient — Chronic IBS

"I think that could be really interesting for trying to understand somebody's pain who has a lot of it, because that's a hard thing to do. Somebody comes to you with a lot of pain, they want to unpack it all and you don't always have all the time to do it. So optimizing the visual representation of pain could be very helpful for doctors."

Pain Specialist — Stanford Medicine

"When you put it on the body, I'm keying in on that spot on his left scapula — that's where the rhomboids are. That's probably where he's got something going on right there. So that's much more specific than saying I have back pain, and much more helpful for me."

Pain Specialist — Stanford Medicine

Visual tools act as grounding for language

Try it yourself

Layers

Color

Pick color

Thickness

5

Intensity

75

Glow Tempo

5

Movement

Speed

Disappearance

Draw on the canvas to map your sensations

For the full experience, launch the Illuminate tool ↗

On a dark canvas, users draw with glowing, animated strokes, each layer representing a different sensation. The result is a pain'ting: an expressive, embodied record of an experience words were never adequate to hold.

Over time, a new longitudinal dataset of the individual experience of pain is built; one that supports patient advocacy and access to understanding and care.

A new kind of clinical data, and a new kind of care.

TWO SIDES OF THE SAME TOOL

Built for the Individual

Enables expression that precisely embodies sensations and allows others to truly understand.
Longitudinally mapping how pain manifests from day to day builds strong data for a patient advocacy toolkit.
Shifting the fundamental ways we talk about pain recharacterizes negative associations to improve individual control over modulation and perception.

Built for the Care Provider

A dataset that has never existed before and provides new insights: longitudinal, quantitative, qualitative.
Providers can quickly identify diagnostic clues that are missed during verbal triage.
Creating straightforward communication pathways to building understanding and empathy; building provider trust in patients.

↻ Click to flip

There's so much to be done.

Pattern recognition & diagnostics: A large dataset of pain drawings mapped to diagnoses and patient histories could surface patterns that verbal description alone never captures, informing new diagnostic models and deepening our understanding of how pain presents across conditions and over time.

Bridging communication gaps in clinical care: A shared visual language for pain could lower barriers for patients who struggle to describe their symptoms due to language, literacy, or cultural differences, making clinical encounters more equitable and more precise.

Medical education & empathy training: Illuminate could be integrated into clinical training to help future providers develop richer mental models of what pain actually looks and feels like for patients, moving beyond textbook symptom lists toward more human expression & connection.

Coming Soon

Pilot Clinical Study, Stanford Pain Management Center

Pilot Clinical Study, Lucille Packard Children's Hospital