[CHALLENGE DATA NOW AVAILABLE] AI4Pain challenge @ACII2026

[Temi Olugbade]

THE AI4Pain CHALLENGE DATASETS ARE NOW AVAILABLE FOR YOU TO ACCESS.

WE LOOK FORWARD TO YOUR PARTICIPATION IN THE GRAND CHALLENGE.

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Third Multimodal Sensing Grand Challenge for Next-Gen Pain Assessment (AI4Pain 2026)

a part of the International Workshop on Pain Assessment and Affective Intelligence (PAAIn)

*7 September 2026*

at ACII 2026, Puebla, México 

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Call for Participation

We invite participation in the Third Multimodal Sensing Grand Challenge for Next-Gen Pain Assessment (AI4Pain 2026) challenge. Participants can take part in either of two tracks.

***Track 1 - Physiological-Based Pain Assessment involves analysis of physiological responses to painful stimulation using signals such as Electrodermal Activity (EDA), Blood Volume Pulse (BVP), Respiratory (RESP), and Peripheral Oxygen Saturation (SpO₂). The task consists of both pain detection and pain localisation, requiring participants to classify each sample into one of three categories: No Pain (NP), Hand Pain (HP), or Arm Pain (AP). Participants are encouraged to explore various feature extraction techniques, machine learning models, and deep learning architectures. More details - https://sites.google.com/view/ai4pain2026/home. 

***Track 2 - Movement-based Pain Assessment involves classification of pain levels based on body movement data of people with chronic pain during home activities. The task focuses on discrimination between three levels of pain (Low level pain (LP), Medium level Pain (MP), High level pain (HP)). Teams are encouraged to explore rigorous and innovative approaches in terms of feature extraction, machine learning architectures, data augmentation / imputation, and transfer learning. More details - https://sites.google.com/view/ai4pain2026-movement-track/home. 

You are also encouraged to submit other papers on health- and wellbeing-related affective states to the larger PAAIn 2026 workshop. 

Important Dates

The time zone for the deadlines below is Anywhere on Earth (AOE).

• Data available: 13 April 2026
• Please see the track websites above for other relevant dates
• Workshop paper submission deadline: 30 May 2026
• Workshop paper decision notification: 3 July 2026
• Camera-ready paper submission deadline: 10 July 2026
• Early-bird registration deadline: 3 July 2026
• ACII Workshops (and DC): 7 Sept 2026