Wearables in Practice: the use of biofeedback in mental health care : A literature review

This research is aimed to find out if wearable biofeedback interventions are currently being used in mental health care, and additionally what kind of biofeedback interventions. To answer this question, the databases of Psychinfo and Scopus were searched for relevant articles. In this research the keywords ‘biofeedback’, ‘wearables’ and ‘mental health care’ have been used. This resulted initially in an amount of 83 articles. After applying the exclusion criterion, 8 articles remained. The remaining eight articles have been read with the objective of answering the sub-questions. For this reason, attention has been paid to the technology that was used, the different modalities, the mental disorder that was treated, the reported effectivity and finally the assessed interventions have been compared to the different levels within the technology readiness level index. The results show that most of the interventions are a long way from being implemented into the mental healthcare. Frequently the technology is not yet wearable, mainly in the design phase and connected to a computer and therefore static. The effectiveness is only shown subjectively by means of self-report. However, there are in fact some articles that objectively report a decrease in sympathetic excitement.