In modern psychotherapy, digital health technology offers advanced and personalized therapy options, increasing availability as well as ecological validity. These aspects have proven to be highly relevant for children and adolescents with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Exposure and Response Prevention therapy, which is the state-of-the-art treatment for OCD, builds on the reconstruction of everyday life exposure to anxious situations. However, while compulsive behavior predominantly occurs in home environments, exposure situations during therapy are limited to clinical settings. Telemedical treatment allows to shift from this limited exposure reconstruction to exposure situations in real life.In the SSTeP KiZ study (smart sensor technology in telepsychotherapy for children and adolescents with OCD), we combine video therapy with wearable sensors delivering physiological and behavioral measures to objectively determine the stress level of patients. The setup allows to gain information from exposure to stress in a realistic environment both during and outside of therapy sessions.In a first pilot study, we explored the sensitivity of individual sensor modalities to different levels of stress and anxiety. For this, we captured the obsessive-compulsive behavior of five adolescents with an ECG chest belt, inertial sensors capturing hand movements, and an eye tracker.Despite their prototypical nature, our results deliver strong evidence that the examined sensor modalities yield biomarkers allowing for personalized detection and quantification of stress and anxiety. This opens up future possibilities to evaluate the severity of individual compulsive behavior based on multivariate state classification in real-life situations.Clinical relevance-Our results demonstrate the potential for efficient personalized psychotherapy by monitoring physiological and behavioral changes with multiple sensor modalities in ecologically valid real-life scenarios. *This work is funded by the Bundesministerium für Gesundheit (BMG) project SSTeP KiZ (2520DAT700)

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In this manuscript, we describe the soft- and hardware architecture as well as the implementation of a modern Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) system for sensor-assisted telepsychotherapy. It enables telepsychotherapy sessions in which the patient exercises therapy-relevant behaviors in their home environment under the remote supervision of the therapist. Wearable sensor information (electrocardiogram (ECG), movement sensors, and eye tracking) is streamed in real time to the therapist to deliver objective information about specific behavior-triggering situations and the stress level of the patients. We describe the IT infrastructure of the system which uses open standards such as WebRTC and OpenID Connect (OIDC). We also describe the system’s security concept, its container-based deployment, and demonstrate performance analyses. The system is used in the ongoing study SSTeP-KiZ (smart sensor technology in telepsychotherapy for children and adolescents with obsessive-compulsive disorder) and shows sufficient technical performance.

<div>In modern psychotherapy, digital health technology offers advanced and personalized therapy options, increasing availability as well as ecological validity. These aspects have proven to be highly relevant for children and adolescents with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Exposure and Response Prevention therapy, which is the state-of-the-art treatment for OCD, builds on the reconstruction of everyday life exposure to anxious situations. However, while compulsive behavior predominantly occurs in home environments, exposure situations during therapy are limited to clinical settings. Telemedical treatment allows to shift from this limited exposure reconstruction to exposure situations in real life. In the SSTeP KiZ study (smart sensor technology in telepsychotherapy for children and adolescents with OCD), we combine video therapy with wearable sensors delivering physiological and behavioral measures to objectively determine the stress level of patients. The setup allows to gain information from exposure to stress in a realistic environment both during and outside of therapy sessions. In a first pilot study, we explored the sensitivity of individual sensor modalities to different levels of stress and anxiety. For this, we captured the obsessive-compulsive behavior of five adolescents with an ECG chest belt, inertial sensors capturing hand movements, and an eye tracker. Despite their prototypical nature, our results deliver strong evidence that the examined sensor modalities yield biomarkers allowing for personalized detection and quantification of stress and anxiety. This opens up future possibilities to evaluate the severity of individual compulsive behavior based on multivariate state classification in real-life situations.</div>

<div>In modern psychotherapy, digital health technology offers advanced and personalized therapy options, increasing availability as well as ecological validity. These aspects have proven to be highly relevant for children and adolescents with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Exposure and Response Prevention therapy, which is the state-of-the-art treatment for OCD, builds on the reconstruction of everyday life exposure to anxious situations. However, while compulsive behavior predominantly occurs in home environments, exposure situations during therapy are limited to clinical settings. Telemedical treatment allows to shift from this limited exposure reconstruction to exposure situations in real life. In the SSTeP KiZ study (smart sensor technology in telepsychotherapy for children and adolescents with OCD), we combine video therapy with wearable sensors delivering physiological and behavioral measures to objectively determine the stress level of patients. The setup allows to gain information from exposure to stress in a realistic environment both during and outside of therapy sessions. In a first pilot study, we explored the sensitivity of individual sensor modalities to different levels of stress and anxiety. For this, we captured the obsessive-compulsive behavior of five adolescents with an ECG chest belt, inertial sensors capturing hand movements, and an eye tracker. Despite their prototypical nature, our results deliver strong evidence that the examined sensor modalities yield biomarkers allowing for personalized detection and quantification of stress and anxiety. This opens up future possibilities to evaluate the severity of individual compulsive behavior based on multivariate state classification in real-life situations.</div>