The system proposed is helping patients suffering from panic disorder to better handle debilitating panic attacks in a home environment.
Occasional anxiety is a normal part of life. You might feel anxious when faced with a problem at work, before taking a test, or making an important decision. But anxiety disorders involve more than temporary worry or fear. For a person with an anxiety disorder, the anxiety does not go away and can get worse over time. The feelings can interfere with daily activities such as job performance, school work, and relationships. One type of anxiety disorder is the panic disorder. People with panic disorder have recurrent unexpected panic attacks, which are sudden periods of intense fear that may include palpitations, pounding heart, or accelerated heart rate; sweating; trembling or shaking; sensations of shortness of breath, smothering, or choking; and feeling of impending doom. Panic disorder symptoms include:
- Sudden and repeated attacks of intense fear
- Feelings of being out of control during a panic attack
- Intense worries about when the next attack will happen
- Fear or avoidance of places where panic attacks have occurred in the past
This condition may often be overlooked, partly due to patients concealing it, not wanting to be associated with the stigma of a “mental disease”. Statistics though reveal that in Italy, about 10 million people have, at least once in their lives, experienced a panic attack, while over 2 million are suffering from panic disorder i.e. sustained panic attack incidents. Similar data are reported worldwide; in the US the lifetime prevalence of panic disorder is at 4.7% while the 12 month one is at 2.7%, with almost half of these cases classified as “severe”.
Management of the panic attacks via our BYTA system consists in:
- Playing music and dimming the lights of the environment, creating a more relaxed atmosphere for the user as it has been found that fluorescent light may exacerbate the condition.
- Instructing you to breathe in a manner to avoid hyperventilation. Hyperventilation is a symptom of a panic attack where rapid shallow breathing is expelling carbon dioxide faster than the body of the person afflicted is producing it. Deliberate deep breathing exercises help to rebalance the CO2 levels in the blood.
- Diffusing a relaxing aroma in the room, helping reduce stress and anxiety.
Contents
AmI Main Steps
| AmI Step | Description |
|---|---|
| Sensing | Sensing the heart rate and perspiration of the user to detect an impending panic attack |
| Reasoning | The system processes the data sensed in order to recognize context and whether a true panic attack is imminent, in contrast to a false positive |
| Acting | Lights and music management, breathing exercises instructions |
| Interacting | User follows breathing exercises and rates experience for future settings adjustment. Also may turn the system off or change parameters |
AmI Features
| AmI Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Sensitive | Sensing the user’s state |
| Responsive | Able to act according to user’s needs |
| Adaptive | Using different lights and breathing count settings, based on past interventions’ effectiveness |
| Transparent | Running in the background, no need for the user to “turn on” anything |
| Ubiquitous | Anyone may benefit from BYTA |
| Intelligent | The system ignores false positives e.g. a gym visit that could be mistaken for a panic attack, and also intelligently changes parameters during and after each intervention to become more suited to the user |
Open issues
- Further research on breathing techniques to identify the optimal hyperventilation intervention strategy.