Title: Tracking arousal responses under stress with biometric ocular photometry eyewear.
Abstract: Nearly one in five U.S. adults currently live with a mental illness, yet few have access to adequate mental healthcare. Even with ample financial resources, the diagnosis, treatment, and support for these chronic and intermittent conditions are challenging outside inpatient facilities. Dysfunctional arousal responses are understood as maladaptive adjustments of autonomic and endocrinological responsivity upon motivationally salient stimuli, and are common components of many neuropsychiatric disorders, yet these are routinely disregarded because arousal measurement remains elusive. The current state-of-the-art technology for arousal studies is pupillometry, which is often insufficient to reliably assess arousal states on its own. An enhanced strategy includes adding cardiac and respiratory metrics with additional monitoring devices, but the combination of these three biometrics is impractical and limits arousal studies to laboratory settings. Reliable around-the-clock tracking of arousal in humans currently remains unfeasible. Nonetheless, the ability to detect dysfunctions of the arousal response with practical, inexpensive, and minimally invasive technology would revolutionize mental healthcare. Tracking arousal in real time would enable currently unfeasible tailored treatment strategies for mental illnesses, in which counseling, advice, or even fast-acting drugs could be provided to patients exactly at the time and place where they would be most beneficial. We propose to tackle this challenge with a new technology we are developing here at UNC, Biometric Ocular Photometry (BOP) which has the potential to simultaneously record several biometric data and infer arousal states with a single device. BOP operates with invisible infrared light to illuminate the back of the eye, and with photodetectors to measure the flow of diffused infrared photons through the pupil. We will develop a wearable modified pair of glasses with BOP sensors integrated into the frames, that will monitor arousal responses in real-time and in freely-moving humans. We expect that the prototype will be of interest to medical researchers for the study of many psychiatric disorders and open multiple new research directions through funding opportunities across various funding agencies.
