The Effectiveness of Point-of-Care Testing with Intervention in Psychopathology: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Point-of-Care Testing (POCT) have mainly addressed biochemical systems. This paper presents a POCT based on recording physiological data and the options for intervention. Smartphone or tablets provide an ever-increasing number of applications for measuring diverse biochemical as well as physiological variables. An important adjunct to this is that the POCT App should provide a means of intervention. Previous work on assessing the efficacy of the biofeedback using HeartMath device has mainly concentrated on the effect of heart rate response, measured as heart rate variability (HRV) with the aim of improving anxiety, depression and immune response. This study investigated the effect of diaphragmatic paced breathing (6 breaths/min) or a serious game-based balloon-game for guiding biofeedback compared to normal breathing on electroencephalograph (EEG) signal complexity. Signal characteristics were analyzed following pre-processing and using the Higuchi Fractal Dimension (HFD) from the EEG directly, HFD obtained after applying Hilbert-Huang Transform (HHT) and Sample Entropy (SE) from EEG directly. Six subjects participated in the repeated measures pilot study. EEG was recorded using the Thought Technology device with the scalp electrode located at Cz prior, during and after HeartMath biofeedback training. Using all three complexity measures, most or all participants showed the lowest signal complexity during paced breathing regardless of analysis method. Only HFD with HHT showed a significant statistical difference (p<0.05) between the three conditions when using a Friedman repeated measures test. The findings suggest that biofeedback may be efficacious for POCT in psychopathology to reduce complexity of EEG which is often higher in patients with anxiety, depression or schizophrenia.