Improving Insomnia in People Living with Schizophrenia
About Schizophrenia and Insomnia
Schizophrenia is a severe mental illness that affects 1% of the adult population. Symptoms include hallucination, delusion, and amotivation. 30 to 40% of People Living with Schizophrenia (PLwS) have comorbid insomnia. Insomnia and schizophrenia can easily fall into a negative feedback loop.
One of the most popular and effective treatment to insomnia is Cognitive and Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-i). However,CBT-i is difficult for PLwS, whom often have cognitive decline and reduced memory, to adhere, as it requires active sleep diary keeping and remembering sleep and wake up times.
Methodology
As an undergraduate researcher and a full-stack developer at the Lee Lab @ UC San Diego, our lab's goal is to create a mobile CBT-i application that can aid PLwS with CBT-i. We developed a mobile application that leverages commercially available sleep trackers (Fitbit watch and Withings sleep mat) to record sleep and to provide help based on the collected data.
We used Flutter for frontend and IBM Cloud for backend. I directly contributed to developing layouts and widgets on the frontend and database storage in the backend.
Presentation
Integration of wearable sleep trackers into CBT-i for people aging with SchizophreniaOur research was selected for presentation at the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry Conference. You can get a glimpse of the app and its development process in the link above.