Sensing Data Toolkit Helps Improve Therapy for Veterans with PTSD

Clinical psychologists who treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) could soon gain better insight into how their patients experience triggering environments and situations outside the clinic.

Cognitive behavioral therapies require patients to practice skills between sessions. Clinicians rely on retrospective patient reports to understand what happens during that time.

However, recall bias, selective disclosure, and difficulty remembering can render those reports subjective, incomplete, or inaccurate.

Clinicians can now see sensor data on how patients’ bodies react in these situations thanks to a new technology toolkit from Georgia Tech and Emory University.

A new app that syncs with a FitBit wearable device can track and record heart rate, step count, noise level, and other sensor data when patients practice prolonged exposure homework assigned by their therapists.

A web dashboard lets clinicians review that data, add notes, and track patient progress. This information helps them structure therapy sessions more effectively and accelerate patient progress.

The toolkit is the culmination of a $1.2 million National Science Foundation grant awarded to Georgia Tech’s Rosa Arriaga and Emory’s Andrew Sherrill in 2019.

Arriaga is an associate professor at Tech’s School of Interactive Computing. Sherrill is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Emory School of Medicine.

Sherrill is also a practicing clinical psychologist at the Emory Healthcare Veterans Program and has worked with veterans with PTSD for more than a decade. 

Arriaga and the students in her Ubicomp Health and Wellness Lab spent five years developing the toolkit, which they call the Patient Engagement Computational Sensing System (PECSS).

“It was a lot of master’s students and undergrads who built the back end to the app and the dashboard,” Arriaga said. “It was a lot of work and effort by a lot of students to take an idea from conception to deployment.”

The researchers originally titled the toolkit the Prolonged Exposure Collecting Sensing System, but they changed the name after realizing it could be used for other types of therapy.

“The idea is that for any therapy that has a homework component, this can bridge the gap between patient self-reporting and clinician intuition,” Arriaga said.

Nathaniel Swinger, a Ph.D. student in Arriaga’s lab, co-led a paper on the study’s results along with Ph.D. student Myeonghan Ryu. Their paper received a best paper award at the 2026 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW). Best papers are given to less than 1% of the papers published at the conference.

“Our findings showed that the deployment was quite successful,” Swinger said. “Over 75% of the patients who incorporated PECSS into their treatment experienced a clinically significant change in symptoms. We don’t know if that’s causal, but there is some evidence the system worked to facilitate the process.”

Prolonged exposure is a method for systematically approaching trauma memories and reminders to make them safe and tolerable for patients. It is typically delivered in one-on-one therapy sessions.

Sherrill said the toolkit shows promise toward enhancing prolonged exposure therapy outside of clinical settings.

“Prolonged exposure has been researched more than any other therapy that exists,” Sherrill said. “We know it’s effective, but we’ve had problems for decades implementing it in the real world.

“There’s a need for technology in taking what patients learn in their sessions and having them replicate it outside of the clinic.”

Until now, the impact prolonged exposure on a patient with PTSD depends on the patient’s willingness to self-report the results of their homework.

“The number of potential triggers is an endless list,” Sherrill said. “We want people to approach them with their guard down and not to engage in avoidance or soothing behaviors.”

Sherrill said most of his patients have shown interest in continuing to use the toolkit — even after therapy is no longer needed.

“A system like this could reduce the frequency of sessions with a therapist,” Sherrill said. “We’re teaching patients to be their own therapists. This toolkit gives them a greater sense of independence.”

Given the promising results, Swinger said that ideally the next step would be a large-scale clinical trial.

“We’re looking to better test the causal clinical impacts of the system and a more generalizable notion of efficacy,” Swinger said. “We want to rigorously test it in a clinical setting for people beyond veterans with PTSD.”