Objective pain assessment remains a significant challenge in clinical and research settings due to the subjective nature of self-reported measures. Physiological signals, particularly electrodermal activity (EDA), have emerged as promising indicators of autonomic responses associated with pain. Although recent advances in deep learning have improved the modelling of complex biosignals, many existing approaches remain computationally demanding, limiting their applicability for real-time monitoring in wearable and embedded systems. This paper proposes a fully convolutional network (FCN) for automated pain recognition using EDA signals. The proposed model is designed to efficiently capture temporal patterns in physiological data while maintaining low computational complexity. The approach is evaluated on the AI4Pain dataset for three-class pain classification (No Pain, Low Pain, High Pain). Experimental results show that the proposed FCN achieves an accuracy of 79.23% in offline evaluation. Furthermore, the model enables real-time inference with a latency of 0.47 ms, achieving 73.14% accuracy during real-time operation. These results demonstrate that convolutional architectures can provide an effective balance between predictive performance and computational efficiency, supporting the development of real-time physiological pain monitoring systems using wearable sensing technologies.
Joseph et al. (2026) studied this question.