Dr Aleksandra Badura wins prestigious international award for innovative AI-based pain research

2025-11-20

Dr Aleksandra Badura has been honoured with the international Sword Health Horizon Award 2025. The award ceremony took place on 15 November 2025 during the Sword AI Summit in Porto, Portugal.

The Horizon Award 2025, presented by the Sword Foundation (part of Sword Health), recognises the most innovative research in the field of pain, focusing in particular on the development of non-surgical and non-pharmacological treatment methods.

Pioneering use of sensor data

Dr Badura received the award for a scientific article she co-authored. The publication was selected as the winner from among 966 papers published in 2024, qualifying for the final, which included 27 articles.

The pioneering research approach, which involved the use of data collected from wearable sensors in pain research, was recognised. The key achievements of the award-winning article include:

  • The creation of one of the first open, clinically validated databases of physiological signals for automated pain recognition.
  • Laying the foundations for the development of personalised healthcare based on artificial intelligence.

The PainMonit project and scientific cooperation

The database and the winning article are a direct result of the research project ‘Multimodal pain monitoring platform in physiotherapy (PainMonit)’. This project was carried out in 2019–2022 by the Department of Medical Informatics and Artificial Intelligence at the Silesian University of Technology.

The project was led by Prof. Ewa Piętka, PhD. Dr Maria Bieńkowska, PhD, was also involved in the project on behalf of the Department of Medical Informatics and Artificial Intelligence.

Data related to physiotherapy procedures was collected in cooperation with Prof. Andrzej Myśliwiec, PhD, from the Jerzy Kukuczka Academy of Physical Education in Katowice and his team.

The project involved international scientific units and industry partners: Universität zu Lübeck (Germany), Institute of Experimental Psychology (Germany) and APA sp. z o.o.

The award-winning article is: Gouverneur P., Badura A., Li F., Bieńkowska M., Luebke L., Adamczyk W.M., Szikszay T.M., Myśliwiec A., Luedtke K., Grzegorzek M., Piętka E.: An Experimental and Clinical Physiological Signal Dataset for Automated Pain Recognition. Sci Data 11, 1051 (2024). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03878-w.