Abstract:

Objective To design a personalized neonatal facial pain scale and conduct reliability and validity tests in clinical scenarios of acute pain. Methods 118 newborns who required blood collection procedures in a tertiary class A children’s specialized hospital were selected as the research subjects. By taking videos during the blood collection process and inputting basic facial images with different identity information，a highly realistic personalized neonatal facial pain scale was automatically generated. The neonatal facial coding system and neonatal infant pain scale were compared and evaluated. 36 pediatric nurses were selected to use three different evaluation tools to rate pain in recorded videos of 118 newborns. Results The discrimination indices of Personalized Neonatal Facial Pain Scale was 0.52，The intra group correlation coefficient of inter-rater consistency for the Personalized Neonatal Facial Pain Scale was 0.792，with a test-retest reliability of 0.961. Using the Neonatal Pain Scale and the Neonatal Facial Coding System as criteria，the Spearman correlation coefficients for the validity of the Personalized Neonatal Facial Pain Scale were 0.733（P<0.001） and 0.721（P<0.001），respectively. Bland Altman analysis showed that 94.47% and 96.37% of the points fell within the consistency interval. Conclusion The Personalized Neonatal Facial Pain Scale have good discrimination of pain，reliability and validity，and can be used as a more convenient scale for evaluating acute pain in newborns.

Key words: Neonatal, Pain, Face, Scale, Reliability, Validity, Personalization