Projects:2015s1-36 Heartbeat Perception App

Supervisors

- Prof. Mathias Baumert - Dr. Damith Ranasinghe

Students

- Hong Wei TEO - Siok Teng LOKE

Project Purpose

The purpose of the project is to develop an Android app (heartbeat perception app) for smart mobile device that allows user to measure heartbeat interception to identify individual's heart rate and negative mental symptoms via heartbeat tracking and discrimination tasks and clinical mental questionnaire. This project or Android app can be utilized in 'heart-brain' research, quantifying afferent information from the heart to the brain.

Project Information

The following project allows identification and understanding of the relationship between human's heart and brain when an individual is undergoing a certain emotional states. This is because individual differences in intensity of emotional experience reflect variation in sensitivity to internal bodily responses. The internal body organ that responses during emotional states are human's heart and brain. There are information signals transmitting from heart to brain’s part called right anterior insular when an individual is undergoing emotional experience (angry, sad, depressed and others). The heartbeat perception app allows user to identify mental symptoms of an individual through clinical mental questionnaire and heartbeat detection task. These two methods provide faster and easier method to identify negative mental symptoms (eating disorder, panic disorder, anxiety, depressions and others) rather than using blood testing and medication testing to identify individual's negative mental symptoms. The following project will benefit the medical community because a faster and easier method is provided for medical doctors to identify individual's early stage of negative mental symptoms in short amount of time. This method can prevent the possibilities of negative mental symptoms of the individual for getting worsens if the symptoms is not traced as soon as possible. Besides that, a better mental symptoms test is needed for now rather than relying on medical pills testing. This is because medical pills testing not only does provide a slower way to identify the symptoms, but also may lead to individual's symptoms worsen or harmed to individual's body if wrong medical pills is given by medical doctors.

Project Deliverables

The project's final deliverables shall have a complete simple Android software interface that will be working on Android OS mobile device. The apps shall be able to require user to input their personal information (name, gender, height, weight and etc.) and store on the app’s database. Then, the app shall allow user to assess heart rate tracking task to retrieve their heart rate result. Clinical mental questionnaires will be given to assess the user after the heartbeat interoception task. Lastly, mental symptoms result will be given to authorized administrator (doctor) only to show if the user has potential negative mental symptoms. Both heartbeat interoception task and clinical questionnaires data results will be shown alongside with mental symptoms result. On the heartbeat detection side, the project's final deliverables shall allow the mobile device to communicate with heart rate monitor device wirelessly in order to allow the operation of heartbeat interoception tasks.

Project Components

- Nexus 7 Android OS Tablet - Zephyr HxM BT Heart rate Monitor - Android Studio for Android OS Development

Project Related Works

There are several researches have conducted researches regarding heartbeat perception awareness and human's emotion. First of all, researcher Hugo D. Critchley and his research team stated that negative mental symptoms can be identified through accuracy of heartbeat interoceptive awareness and activity on right anterior insular by assessing an individual on heartbeat perception task and clinical mental questionnaires. In the following research article, researchers have conducted both heartbeat perception tasks method on human that is heartbeat tracking task, individual is asked to count their own heartbeat in a quiet room and heartbeat discrimination task, individual is asked to distinguish their own heartbeat by listening to their own heartbeat. At the same time, the brain activity is measured by fMRI during the pereption task. Then, individual is assessed with clinical mental questionnaires and then, blood pressure of the individual is measured. By referring to these tasks result, researchers founded that negative mental emotion is correlated with both brain activity and heartbeat perception task accuracy and thus, higher interoceptive awareness individual is more vulnerable to negative mental symptoms. Next, research articles by researcher Rainer Schandry stated that heartbeat interoceptive awareness is correlated to negative mental emotion. In the article, similar methods to Hugo D. Critchley's research article methods are conducted which is heartbeat perception task and clinical mental questionnaires are taken without brain activity measurement. The results showed that negative mental symptoms could be identified through clinical mental questionnaires and heartbeat perception task. A clinical mental questionnaire is commonly used in clinics and hospitals to identify patients’ potential mental symptoms before distributing medicines to patients. The advantage of the mental questionnaires is that it provides a faster method in diagnosing potential mental symptoms and it is safer than medicine pills testing method. The drawback of mental questionnaire is one set of questionnaire is able to identify single mental questionnaires only. Thus, patient is required to assess multiple questionnaires to identify patient’s mental symptoms. Besides that, the mental questionnaires could not provide accurate mental symptoms if the patient did not assess the questionnaires seriously. Heartbeat interoception task consists of both heartbeat tracking task and heartbeat discrimination task. According to the research article’s research results by Rainer Schandry, heartbeat discrimintation task provides more accurate result than heartbeat tracking task. However, both heartbeat interoception tasks are included in the project for better accuracy after decision are made during a supervisor and group members meeting. Thus, this project will integrate all of the task methods which are both heartbeat interoception task and clinical mental questionnaires into the software Android app to assess the individual to identify the possible mental symptoms on the individual. This project will provide easier and faster method than the tasks stated in those research articles to identify individual's negative mental symptoms.