Project Results

About This Project

Panic attacks are intense episodes of discomfort, fear, and feelings of helplessness experienced by millions of people every year. Fortunately, panic attacks can be effectively treated with biofeedback therapy, which combines the minute-by-minute tracking of respiratory rate, heart rate, and subjective anxiety levels. Unfortunately, there are currently no widely accessible, accurate means for delivering this therapy. We aim to create an app to disseminate this intervention to anyone in need.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

In panic attacks, intense emotions lead to hyperventilation, which increases blood pH and leads to a cascade of uncomfortable symptoms such as dizziness, heart palpitations, and nausea (Teachman, 2010). Symptoms develop abruptly and peak within 10 minutes (Meuret, 2001).

During biofeedback therapy, patients track their respiratory and heart rates during panic attacks using electronic instruments. Biofeedback therapy is said to help individuals “feel more in control of their bodily reactions and react less fearfully to them," thus ending the cycle of panic (Bouton, 2001).

What is the significance of this project?

Roughly 2 million young adults have had a panic attack in the last 12 months. If untreated, panic attacks can lead to mental illnesses including phobias, depression, and substance use disorders. Currently, biofeedback therapy is only accessible to research study participants using cumbersome hand-held respiratory rate monitors to track their symptoms. Current standard of care includes significant costs and wait times for clinic services, which often do not have equipment to collect physiological data for biofeedback therapy. Home-based therapies are as effective as treatment with a clinician (Wright, 2000), thus we aim to develop an app to 1) accurately track physiological signals, and 2) provide panic attack sufferers access to biofeedback therapy wherever and whenever it's needed.

What are the goals of the project?

The goal of this project is to develop and validate algorithms for extracting heart and respiratory rate from the high-definition (HD) video and/or inertial sensor data sampled by a mobile phone. These algorithms will ultimately form the heart of our app for providing biofeedback therapy to panic attack sufferers as they enable visualization of how these physiological signals are changing during each panic attack episode. Once funded, we will create these algorithms and recruit subjects for our validation study. We will conduct our study by collecting data from 20 participants and establish the accuracy of our algorithms relative to the techniques currently used in clinical practice. Ultimately, we will describe this study and the results in a technical publication.