# Wearable-based Fair and Accurate Pain Assessment Using Multi-Attribute Fairness Loss in Convolutional Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.05333 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05333/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Equality of Opportunity in Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02413/) (2016)
- [A Survey on Bias and Fairness in Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09635/) (2019)
- [Certifying and removing disparate impact](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3756/) (2014)
- [AI Fairness 360: An Extensible Toolkit for Detecting, Understanding, and Mitigating Unwanted Algorithmic Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.01943/) (2018)
- [A Unified Approach to Quantifying Algorithmic Unfairness: Measuring Individual & Group Unfairness via Inequality Indices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00787/) (2018)
- [Bias, Fairness, and Accountability with AI and ML Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06558/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Fairness in Machine Learning-based Hand Load Estimation: A Case Study on Load Carriage Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05610/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The integration of diverse health data, such as IoT (Internet of Things), EHR (Electronic Health Record), and clinical surveys, with scalable AI(Artificial Intelligence) has enabled the identification of physical, behavioral, and psycho-social indicators of pain. However, the adoption of AI in clinical pain evaluation is hindered by challenges like personalization and fairness. Many AI models, including machine and deep learning, exhibit biases, discriminating against specific groups based on gender or ethnicity, causing skepticism among medical professionals about their reliability. This paper proposes a Multi-attribute Fairness Loss (MAFL) based Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model designed to account for protected attributes in data, ensuring fair pain status predictions while minimizing disparities between privileged and unprivileged groups. We evaluate whether a balance between accuracy and fairness is achievable by comparing the proposed model with existing mitigation methods. Our findings indicate that the model performs favorably against state-of-the-art techniques. Using the NIH All-Of-US dataset, comprising data from 868 individuals over 1500 days, we demonstrate our model's effectiveness, achieving accuracy rates between 75% and 85%.