Customer

Veterans Administration Palo Alto Health Care System

A Stanford University School of Medicine professor is using Affectiva Q™Sensors in a two-year, Veterans Administration-funded study on how breathing training helps veterans cope with post-traumatic stress disorder better.

Challenge

Walton Roth, M.D. is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the Stanford School of Medicine and a staff member of the VA Health Care System Palo Alto.

Supported by an award from the Veterans Administration Merit Review, Dr. Roth is conducting a two-year research project to test the effectiveness of breathing training in alleviating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms such as jittery feelings and troubled sleep.

One of Dr. Roth’s challenges is correlating veterans’ self-reported symptoms -- provided in interviews and on surveys -- with their physiological measurements of hyper-arousal.

Another challenge is monitoring participants’ reactions outside the clinic during a 24-hour period while they’re conducting daily activities or sleeping at night.

Key Activities

In May 2010, Dr. Roth launched the first stage of a two-year study. Five participants visited his lab and received the Affectiva Q Sensor, which measures electro-dermal activity (EDA), a measure of emotional sweat also known as skin conductance. They also were fitted with additional sensors to measure respiration, heart rate and electrical activity along the scalp.

After being fitted with sensors, the subjects went home for 24 hours and kept a diary of how they felt while the sensors tracked EDA and other measures. They then returned to the lab, where Dr. Roth’s team downloaded the sensors’ data. The participants will undergo breathing training therapy and repeat the process.

The key advantage of the Affectiva Q Sensor, according to Roth, is that it works well and is small, light and not too burdensome to participants. Other EDA sensors require lab settings, where people sit in chairs and are connected to monitors by cables. Some companies offer ambulatory monitors, in the form of a large box and wires that run up the trunk and down the sleeve. With Q Sensor, the whole device is on people’s wrist. This portability makes it possible to monitor people during their normal activities, a vital factor for gathering data for his study, Dr. Roth says.

Dr. Roth and his team are analyzing the first set of data. He expects to see a correlation between skin conductance and people’s hyper-arousal levels.

Over time, he’s looking to identify treatments that provide lasting relief from PTSD symptoms by addressing both people’s subjective and their physiological signs of hyper-arousal.

Bottom Line

Affectiva Q Sensor measures electro-dermal activity to provide physiological data on of hyper-arousal in PTSD sufferers to augment their self-reported experiences. It is a small, light and comfortable device that subjects wear for 24 hours during normal activities.

Future

Two more years of study on 100 subjects and ongoing data analysis.

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