Games for Treating and Diagnosing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
This chapter describes the use of games for addressing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a syndrome with a strong emotional component, characterized by among other things hyper arousal. A number of games and game like tools for treating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder are described. Subsequently, the chapter describes the design, development, and testing of a specific game for addressing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder which uses emotion recognition to characterize and target patient treatment. In clinical testing the game is found to elicit stress in patients suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder based both on self reports and physiological indicators of stress and arousal. Further, is shown that features extracted from the physiological signals can be combined with patient background information to predict measures of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder severity. This suggests that the combination of games and measurement of physiological indicators of emotional responses holds potential for creating novel tools for treating and diagnosing mental health disorders.