Toward a portable, self-administered critical flicker frequency test

The UbiComp community's research in mental health has often focused on depression, but we believe there are many additional opportunities. As participants in this workshop, we will present our initial work to create a portable and self-administered version of the Critical Flicker Frequency (CFF) test. We focus on hepatic encephalopathy, but the test has potential for long-term self-monitoring in a variety of conditions impacting mental health, including cerebro-organic syndromes, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, chronic fatigue, and testing of psychoactive drugs. CFF can detect transient effects on the brain and retina which serve as indicators for the above conditions. However, commercial devices for performing the CFF test are expensive and unwieldy. This limits clinical availability of CFF testing, prevents frequent self-administered testing, and reduces access. We explore the possibility of an affordable and portable device for self-administered CFF testing, implemented using commodity components paired with a mobile phone app. Such a device surfaces many future research challenges analogous to those in other areas of mental health. As background for discussions in this workshop, we discuss our initial exploratory design efforts and potential future steps for the project.