I-Corps: Digital Therapeutics using autonomic regulation training for students challenged with debilitating stress, anxiety and depression

I-Corps项目更广泛的影响/商业潜力是开发一种生物反馈培训工具，以提高学生的学习成绩。随着提高学习成绩的压力不断增加，越来越多的学生来到学校，在情感上没有做好学习准备。这往往是由于学校缺乏一个健康的社会和情感环境来支持、激励和情感参与学生。随着研究阐明了情绪、学习和表现之间的重要联系，很明显，需要有效的基于学校的干预来促进和整合学生的情感、社交和学业发展，为他们提供提高自我意识和情绪自我管理所需的工具和技能；促进有效的沟通；养成健康、负责任的行为；建立功能性的合作关系。这个I-Corps项目是基于外周自主生物反馈训练装置的开发，作为一个有效的过程，患者可以自我监测心率、皮肤电导率、外周皮肤温度和呼吸速率，同时试图改变他们的内部反应。呼吸练习和正念技术与生物反馈显示相结合，已被证明是教授压力和焦虑自我调节的有力工具。毫不奇怪，许多研究都仔细调查了大学生群体以及他们对生物反馈训练的反应。该技术提供了一个情绪感知、心理健康和健康平台，该平台使用多模态周边生物反馈、无线传感器技术和一个目标导向的软件代理，该软件代理将根据用户来自情绪分析和手势跟踪模块的实时反馈自动优化用户体验。通过软件代理的增强，交互式虚拟对象将具有丰富的个性和足够灵活的情感状态，以智能和情感意识响应用户的交互。该项目的结果将使进一步开发和翻译游戏化，多模式生物反馈培训成为可能。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of a biofeedback training tool to increase student academic performance. As pressures to improve academic performance continue to increase, students are increasingly coming to school emotionally unprepared to learn. This is frequently compounded by the lack of a healthy social and emotional environment within the school to support, motivate, and emotionally engage students. As research has illuminated the important connections between emotions, learning, and performance, it has become apparent that effective school-based interventions are needed to foster and integrate students’ emotional, social, and academic development to provide them with tools and skills needed to increase self-awareness and emotional self-management; promote effective communication; practice healthy, responsible behaviors; and build functional, collaborative relationships. This I-Corps project is based on the development of a peripheral autonomic biofeedback training device as an effective process by which patients self-monitor heart rate, skin conductivity, peripheral skin temperature, and respiration rate while attempting to alter their internal responses. Breathing exercises and mindfulness techniques paired with biofeedback display has proven a powerful tool when teaching self-regulation of stress and anxiety. Not surprisingly, a number of studies have closely examined college student populations and their response to biofeedback training. The technology provides an emotion-aware, mental health and wellness platform that uses multimodal peripheral biofeedback, wireless sensor technology, and a goal-oriented software agent that will automatically refine the user experience based on the users’ real-time feedback from emotion-analyzing and gesture-tracking modules. Augmented by software agents, the interactive virtual objects will possess rich personality and emotional states flexible enough to respond to user’s interactions with intelligence and affective awareness. The results of this project will enable further development and translation of gamified, multimodal biofeedback training.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.