Nebraska Professor Has Developed AI Pain Tracker

Marcia Shade created the Voice-It app to help patients document pain for their clinicians.

Updated on Sept. 23, 2026 in Sex Life

Bold vector editorial illustration showing a porcelain vessel catching abstract sound-wave arcs, representing AI-assisted pain documentation. — University of Nebraska Medical Center researcher Marcia Shade has introduced the Voice-It app, an AI-powered tool designed to help patients document their pain descriptions more accurately for clinicians. AI Illustration. Upload story photo >

Live Poll

Do you believe AI-driven communication tools improve how doctors understand and treat your pain?

University of Nebraska Medical Center professor Marcia Shade has developed an AI-powered app called Voice-It to capture patient pain descriptions. The tool uses voice-to-text models to summarize experiences that traditional 1-10 pain scales fail to document.

Why it matters

Traditional 1-10 pain scales often lack the nuance required for effective clinical assessment. This AI-driven solution provides clinicians with more detailed insights within limited appointment times.

The startup project received a $60,000 award from a National Institutes of Health pitch competition. It replaces the limitations of the traditional 1-10 pain scale used by medical professionals.

The players

Marcia Shade

She is a professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center who specializes in improving pain communication.

University of Nebraska Medical Center

This Omaha-based academic institution supports the research and development of the Voice-It startup.

National Institutes of Health

This federal agency supports medical research and provided the $60,000 award for the PAINChat project.

The details

Developed by Marcia Shade, the Voice-It platform uses a chatbot built by the Attic software development team to process patient descriptions. The app is specifically designed to aid communication but will not provide medical treatment suggestions.

Marcia Shade conceived the idea for the pain app in 2016.
Shade entered a National Institutes of Health startup accelerator in 2023.

Culture Shift

The transition toward digital patient-reported outcome measures aims to replace subjective reporting with granular data. This project follows that shift by moving clinical assessment away from the simplistic 1-10 pain scale used for decades.

Patients utilizing this tool in Omaha will spend less time manually documenting their conditions before appointments. The app streamlines communication to ensure that nuanced descriptions reach doctors more efficiently.

The takeaway

Using AI to capture descriptive language can help bridge the gap between patient experience and clinical understanding. Patients looking to improve their own health outcomes should focus on recording specific triggers and sensations rather than relying solely on abstract numbers.

What happens next

Marcia Shade plans to pursue a federal SBIR grant through the National Institutes of Health to scale the platform and will eventually seek venture capital funding.