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Monday, May 1, 2017

Dream catcher review

One of the groups in our class developed a bracelet called a Dream Catcher, which is intended to monitor a person's heart while they sleep in order to determine when they are having PTSD-related nightmares. When the person in question begins to have a nightmare, the bracelet will either alert the user, waking them up with vibration, or alert a helper (another person or a dog trained to assist) to help wake them up.

This bracelet, although mostly designed with nightmares in mind, can also assist with PTSD events during the day. It can be manually disabled before heart-raising events such as exercise, and has a button that can be pressed to instantly contact help if an event occurs during this period of inactivation.

This product's implementation is currently limited, as the only PTSD indicator it can currently measure is heart rate. Heart rate is a bit unreliable as a PTSD indicator, as it will increase if the person is having any sort of stimulating or exciting dream, not just a PTSD nightmare. Although false alarms by the bracelet are a problem, I believe that if anyone's life is being significantly affected by PTSD nightmares, the benefit of being awoken from them outweighs the risk of potentially being awoken from other types of dreams. If a non-invasive way to measure blood pressure or blood hormone levels is developed in the near future, this bracelet will become much more reliable upon implementation, and will become even more useful for people affected by PTSD nightmares.

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