Publications

A wearable and mobile intervention delivery system for individuals with panic disorder

Authors: Luís Cruz, Jonathan Rubin, Rui Abreu, Shane Ahern, Hoda Eldardiry, Daniel G. Bobrow

Published in: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (pp. 175–182).

Abstract: Panic disorder is a serious condition that affects approximately six million adults in the United States per year. Reducing the severity of panic attack symptoms would allow a better quality of life for panic attack sufferers. This paper presents steps towards a mobile and wearable system that aims to help reduce the severity of symptoms experienced by individuals with this condition. The system provides a way to continuously monitor the physiological data of an individual via a wearable device. Users are able to report when panic attacks take place, along with a rating of the severity of symptoms experienced. Reported episodes provide ground truth data to build panic prediction models. The eventual goal of the system is to make predictions about approaching panic attacks and to deliver interventions that help the individual to cope with the approaching episode. We describe a mobile-based intervention that has been developed, which instructs the individual to perform breathing and relaxation exercises. Presently, the system has been utilized in a small pilot study where 10 individuals who suffer from panic disorder reported 29 panic attacks while collecting physiological data, along with the severity of symptoms. We found that out of 15 symptoms the ones with high severity reported were anxiety, worry and shortness of breath. Furthermore, physiological differences were observed between panic and non-panic intervals.

@inproceedings{10.1145/2836041.2836058, author = {Cruz, Luis and Rubin, Jonathan and Abreu, Rui and Ahern, Shane and Eldardiry, Hoda and Bobrow, Daniel G.}, title = {A Wearable and Mobile Intervention Delivery System for Individuals with Panic Disorder}, year = {2015}, isbn = {9781450336055}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/2836041.2836058}, doi = {10.1145/2836041.2836058}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia}, pages = {175–182}, numpages = {8}, keywords = {ubiquitous computing, physiological monitoring, mobile applications, mHealth, wearables}, location = {Linz, Austria}, series = {MUM '15} }

Read me: Preprint. DOI: 10.1145/2836041.2836058.