Analyzing Heart Rate as a Physiological Indicator of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: A Scoping Literature Review

摘要

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a mental condition that develops in people who face a shocking event and undergo difficulties recovering from it (Nagpal, Gleichauf, & Ginsberg, 2013). Depression, anxiety, emotional instabilities, suicidal thoughts, and cardiovascular disease are common effects of PTSD. Although over 10% of individuals in the United States have PTSD at any given time, barriers prevent this population from accessing proper care (Moon, Smith, Sasangohar, Benzer, & Kum, 2009; Reisman, 2016). One of the challenges impacting patients is that treatment avenues are mostly limited to therapy sessions and medications. However, PTSD symptoms are more likely to be triggered outside clinical settings (Rodriguez-Paras et al., 2017). Mobile Health (mHealth) apps have shown promise to facilitate the remote and continuous monitoring of PTSD patients in between therapy sessions (Galea et al., 2012; Sadeghi, Khanade, Sasangohar, & Sutherland, 2018). One of the most important features of mHealth apps is their ability to continuously monitor physiological reactions and analyze the relationship between these reactions and individuals' responses to PTSD triggers (Rodriguez-Paras et al., 2017). Deficient models and analyses of physiological reactions may lead to symptoms deterioration and poor health outcomes. In the area of anxiety disorders and specifically PTSD, heart rate measures show the strongest relationships with PTSD states (Buckley, Holohan, Greif, Bedard, & Suvak, 2004). Understanding and modeling PTSD-specific heart rate reactions and patterns can pave the way for non-intrusive monitoring of PTSD symptoms using off-the-shelf wearable devices.