Trauma Ontologies

download: svn checkout http://tracinsy.ewi.tudelft.nl/pub/svn/HealthPsychology/TraumaOntologies

PTSD patients often have fragmented memories of their trauma and are very reluctant to recall them, requir- ing detailed questions to stimulate memory retrieval.

The TraumaOntologies module is a module that generates targeted questions. With the help of targeted questions, the system can assist in effectively recalling events, the surroundings in which they took place and the feelings associated with them.

For example, the questions can focus on the patient's specific situation. Was the veteran serving in Afghanistan or Lebanon? Did the traumatic event happen indoors or outdoors? Depending on the answers given, the computer system automatically moves to the next step, for example asking about the weather that day or army base served in. As you can imagine, the questions for someone who has suffered sexual abuse are more likely to be about the living room and the perpetrator.

To do this, the module uses an ontology that fits the required treatment. More detailed, it contains the relevant relations between possible events, places, objects, and can address these in various ways such as top-down (collect all relevant items first, then dig deeper one item at a time) or depth first.

Provided with this module are a number of examples:

treatment area	name of owl file
child sexual abuse	Child Sexual Abuse.owl
army post traumatic stress, general	War.owl
army post traumatic stress, Afghanistan	War Afghanistan.owl
army post traumatic stress, Bosnia	War Bosnia.owl
army post traumatic stress, Lybya	War Libya.owl

The module is highly adaptable to your own situation: you can use your own owl and csv files to drive the dialog and to handle specific translation requirements. The traversal strategy of the questions can also be controlled. The technical sections below describe in detail how this is done.

The module can be easily attached to our general translation module from our ​Utilities project. This is demonstrated in our SimpleGUI demonstration.

This package can be included with the following maven code

<repositories>
	<repository>
		<id>artifactory.ewi.tudelft.nl</id>
		<url>http://artifactory.ewi.tudelft.nl/artifactory/libs-release</url>
		<snapshots>
			<enabled>false</enabled>
		</snapshots>
	</repository>
</repositories>

<dependencies>
	<dependency>
		<groupId>tudelft.healthpsychology</groupId>
		<artifactId>traumaontologies</artifactId>
		<version>1.0.0</version>
	</dependency>
</dependencies>

Examples

Various example codes are available

• You can download a ready-to-run jar ​here (just double click to run; you need to have java installed)
• Click on the picture below to run the app in your browser

• The junit tests for the package here.
• Make your own example using this code snip plus the maven dependencies above

Technical details

The technical details are explained in the technical manual​.

Together with the javadoc in the code (available also through the artifactory) this allows programmers to use the module to create a dialog for their specific treatment.

The starting point is an ontology in a .owl file. This file contains multiple trees, owl classes representing a hierarchy of subjects and objects relevant for the treatment, plus detail questions possibly attached to these subjects and objects.. The classes in the ontology also have properties attached. Specifically, the labels and comments in these properties are used to contain fine-grained open questions intending to revive some specific memories. An example is shown in the figure:

Via an adapter we convert these into general attribute trees (trees where each node has attributes). The owl clasees are converted to tree nodes and the properties of the nodes become the attributes of the nodes.

Each of the attribute trees is used to generate the relevant answers to the questions

You can use this maven dependency

<dependency>
    <groupId>tudelft.healthpsychology</groupId>
    <artifactId>traumaontologies</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.0</version>
</dependency>

You need to tell maven to look in our repository

<repository>
	<id>artifactory.ewi.tudelft.nl</id>
	<url>http://artifactory.ewi.tudelft.nl/artifactory/libs-release</url>
	<snapshots>
		<enabled>false</enabled>
	</snapshots>
</repository>

References

Tielman, M.L., Neerincx, M.A., Bidarra, R., Kybartas, B,., Brinkman, W.P. (2017). A Therapy System for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Using a Virtual Agent and Virtual Storytelling to Reconstruct Traumatic Memories. Journal of medical systems, 41: 125. ​​https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10916-017-0771-y

Tielman, M., van Meggelen, M., Neerincx, M. A., & Brinkman, W. P. (2015, August). An Ontology-Based Question System for a Virtual Coach Assisting in Trauma Recollection. In Intelligent Virtual Agents (pp. 17-27). Springer International Publishing. preprint ​​https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-21996-7_2