PTSD Prevention Training

The app was designed to complement a post-traumatic-stress disorder (PTSD) prevention program targeted at soldiers before they go to war. The training was developed under commission of the German rescue forces. Soldiers play stress games and learn several relaxation techniques in order to improve their stress resilience.

HOW TO CONVINCE A SOLDIER TO PRACTICE RELAXATION TECHNIQUES?

Working with soldiers has shown that real-time biofeedback can lead to more acceptance of such methods. This is why the team decided to work with heart rate sensors. New technology in form of heart rate sensors build into the smartphone camera are useful innovations that lower the barrier for training.

THE DESIGN PROCESS

The idea was to go away from simple before-after bar graphs that show change in one's ability to adapt to previous stress situations and to design more abstract visualizations. We decided to work with visual metaphors for Heart Rate Variablity (HRV). The final metaphorical ideas that made it to a design were good-bad, wideness-narrowness and harmony-disharmony.

MY TASK

My task was to design several biofeedback visualizations for the corresponding mobile app. Based on an exploratory literature review in the fields of affective computing and affective interaction and drawn from inspirations of previous design work in these fields, I came up with three different biofeedback visualizations, which will be programmed and integrated in the app in the future.

 

FINAL DESIGNS

The user can choose between all three design. This allows the user to decide to which visualization the user can relate to best.

DESIGN 1: Fading Dots

  • Metaphor: This design represents the metaphor of good vs. bad adaptability to stress. Cooler colors indicate that the user is adapting well to the previous stress situation, while warmer colors show poor adaptability.
  • Interaction: Colored dots are streaming from the top right into the screen and vanish at the bottom left.

DESIGN 2: Bouncing Balls

<-- stressed heart

relaxed heart -->

  • Metaphor: This design represents Heart Rate Variability as an indicator for a flexible autonomous nervous system that is given space to react and interact with situational demands.
  • Interaction: Balls are persistently jumping up and down. When the mobile phone records low heart rate variability (HRV), balls only have little space to jump. The balls will hinder each other due to the fact that there is little space to jump. Balls will spread, the greater the users’ HRV becomes. In case of high HRV, the balls would be able to use the whole space of the screen in order to jump up and down.

DESIGN 3: Pulsating Water

  • Metaphor: This design uses the metaphor of the two main parts of the nervous system, which work together in harmony as soon as users start adapting to stress.
  • Interaction: The more the users relaxes the calmer the water becomes.

<-- stressed heart

relaxed heart -->

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