Tingle

Manage your Tingle gesture detection and feedback bracelet.

Try the Tingle app with orientation data from your phone!

When not connected to a Tingle device, the Tingle app will default to data from your phone's accelerometer (orientation). You will see two lines representing pitch and roll on the "TRAIN" screen - they will change as you move your phone around. You can use the App's recursive neural network capabilities to do basic position detection with your phone.

Here's how! Hold your phone steady in the position you want to detect - then press the "ADD ON TARGET" button. Press again to stop sampling data - or wait for it to max out at 100 samples. Then press "ADD OFF TARGET" and wave your phone all over the place in every position except the "ON TARGET" position. Alternatively, you can hold your phone steady in a second position while gathering data.

Once you have collected both on and off target data, press the "TRAIN NEURAL NETWORK" button. The two lines representing pitch and roll data from your phone will disappear and be replaced by one line representing the output of the LSTM recursive neural network you just trained. Try moving your phone in different positions and see what happens.

*This all works best if there are more or less equal amounts of on and off-target data.

Prevalence of body-focused repetitive behaviors (BFRBs)

Body-focused repetitive behaviors (BFRBs), symptoms of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and other conditions involving compulsions (e.g., Autism Spectrum Disorder) involve compulsively causing physical injury and/or damaging one’s physical appearance. These are among the most poorly understood symptoms; they are often misdiagnosed and undertreated. BFRBs include hitting oneself, biting, pulling out hair, skin picking and cutting, as well less severe but damaging behaviors such as nail biting, thumb sucking, and nose picking (Families & Health). These symptoms affect at least 5% of the population (Families & Health); hair pulling alone affects 1%, or about 3 million people in the US (Diefenbach, Reitman & Williamson 2002). BRFBs are highly comorbid. Studies have shown that as many as 70% of those with one BRFB will have another co-occurring BRFB (Conelea, Frank & Walther, 2017). While often impairing, affecting medical health and/or disfiguring, these symptoms are frequently reported but often not observed in clinical settings. This makes diagnosis, as well as treatment planning and monitoring, exceedingly difficult. To avoid pain and disfigurement, it is imperative to identify a reliable means to automatically identify and monitor BFRBs, especially outside the clinic setting. Clinicians need data on BFRB frequency and timing for the purposes of diagnosis, treatment planning and monitoring while patients need immediate, real-time feedback to make behavioral therapies more effective.

The “Tingle” device

To address this previously unmet clinical need, we have created a prototype for a wrist-worn device called the “Tingle” that can monitor and record BFRBs while also providing real-time (haptic) feedback (on the wrist) to the individual with BFRBs when they occur.

The Tingle is well-positioned to address the tremendous unmet need in the care of individuals with BFRBs and other damaging and impairing compulsive behaviors. The Tingle will revolutionize the diagnosis and treatment of at least 5% of the population affected by these severe symptoms by using a convenient, automated, unobtrusive, and inexpensive device that both records behaviors for clinical assessment and provides accurate, real-time feedback to the wearer in support of therapy. We will evaluate the Tingle wearable device to facilitate diagnosis and therapy outside the clinic. In turn, this will facilitate the more rapid commercialization of this product to make it more widely available to clinicians and their patients.