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TRICH or Treat

Development of behavioral-therapy system for treatment of Trichotillomania

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Membership level

2020-2021 Team

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Team Name

TRICH or Treat

Project Title

Development of behavioral-therapy system for treatment of Trichotillomania

Design Challenge

Trichotillomania affects about 3 million people in the US, causing impairment, distress, and problems with psychological adjustment. Behavior therapy is a promising treatment but has difficulties with reinforcing acceptable behavior sufficiently. We are senior design students at Rice University studying Trichotillomania in order to design and build a system capable of identifying behavior of interest and treating non-desired behavior using a reward-based system. Our goal is to develop a solution that can provide more effective treatment for Trichotillomania by reducing the frequency of false positives by using a sensor glove in conjunction with a phone application.

Design Summary

The TRICH or Treat trichotillomania (TTM) therapy device is a two-component system that consists of a glove wearable and a smartphone app. The glove wearable has flex sensors and a gyroscope that are wired to an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense which collects and interprets data collected from the sensors and gyroscope to determine whether a hair-pull occurred. The Arduino Nano also has a Bluetooth connection feature, so an external Bluetooth receiver module is not required for communication to the phone. The smartphone app component of this device provides an interface for the user to track their hair-pulling behavior. There is a timer on the home screen that keeps track of “no-pull” streaks and allows the user to access rewards following streaks exceeding one day. Additionally, there are bar graphs that show the user their pulling behaviors for the weekly or monthly basis as well as a graph that shows which times of day they pull most frequently.

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