Active Self-Tracking of Subjective Experience with a One-Button Wearable: A Case Study in Military PTSD
This is an incremental improvement for military PTSD patients and therapists, offering a simple tool to enhance therapeutic insights.
The study tackled the problem of monitoring PTSD symptoms by developing a one-button wearable for self-tracking a bodily precursor to hyperarousal in a veteran, resulting in data that provided crucial details and helped disentangle symptoms in therapy.
We describe a case study with the participation of a Danish veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As part of psychotherapeutic treatment the participant and therapist have used our novel technique for instrumenting self-tracking of select aspects of subjective experience using a one-button wearable device. The instrumentation system is described along with the specific self-track- ing protocol which defined the participant's self-tracking of a single symptom, namely the occurrences of a bodily experienced precursor to hyperarousal. Results from the case study demonstrate how self-tracking data on a single symptom collected by a patient can provide valuable input to the therapeutic process. Specifically, it facilitated identification of crucial details otherwise unavailable from the clinical assessment and even became decisive in disentangling different symptoms and their causes.