Qualitative modeling of pressure vs. pain relations in women suffering from dyspareunia

Genital pain / penetration disorders affect a significant portion of the female population and diminish significantly the quality of life of the subjects. Treatments, that often consist in stretching opportunely the vaginal duct by means of opportune vaginal dilators, are known to be invasive, lengthy and uncomfortable. Designing better treatments (e.g., more efficient locations and levels of pressures) nonetheless requires understanding better how the pressure developed in the vaginal channel affects the patient and leads to subjective pain. Here we take a control -oriented approach to the problem, and aim at describing the dynamics of the pressure vs. pain mechanisms by means of opportune state space representations. In particular, we first collect and discuss the medical literature, that describes how the variables that are involved in the treatment of genital pain / penetration disorders with vaginal dilators, are logically related. After this we translate (and complete) this set of logical relations into a qualitative model that allows control oriented analyses of the dynamics. The obtained state space model is then proved to both mimic correctly what is expected from logical perspectives and reproduce behaviors measured in clinical settings. (C) 2017, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.