Outreach

INAOE Student Project to Support ADHD Diagnosis Wins International Award

Santa María Tonantzintla, Puebla, March 19, 2025. The project "Synchronization of Multiple Biosignals for the Quantitative Analysis of Emotional States in Young People with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder," developed by Érika Altair Castro Verazas, a student at the National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics, and Electronics (INAOE), a public center of the Secretariat of Science, Humanities, Technology, and Innovation (Secihti), was awarded by Fitrockr Health Solutions and Garmin Health Research through the 2023 Garmin Americas Health Research Scholarship.

Érika Altair Castro Verazas is a doctoral student in Biomedical Sciences and Technologies at INAOE. She is developing this research as a doctoral project, under the supervision of Dr. Delia Irazú Hernández Farías and Dr. Carlos Alberto Reyes García, INAOE researchers.

The aforementioned international call for proposals seeks to recognize the innovative use of wearable health data and the Garmin device ecosystem, powered by the Fitrockr platform. The results were announced in January 2024. The winners received five Garmin wearable devices for research projects featuring the latest sensor technology, with three months of unlimited access to the Fitrockr platform for up to 50 users, and a winner's certificate. Projects from Chile, Canada, and the United States were also awarded.

In an interview, Érika Aldair Castro explained that her project seeks to support the diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in university students.

Specifically, the interest in participating in the call was due to the project's need for easy-to-use devices to measure heart rate, stress, and blood oxygen saturation. The platform also allows for device synchronization, data analysis, extraction, processing, and unlimited access. When asked about her interest in ADHD, Erika Aldair Castro comments that it arose because she knew someone who was diagnosed with ADHD at 24 years old. "Many people know they have something, but they normalize it or learn to live with it."

In this context, she realized that there is a gap in the diagnosis of ADHD, which is often underdiagnosed: "What we initially sought was to objectively determine and diagnose this disorder, and then we focused more on inattention. Inattention is a symptom of ADHD that is not visible compared to other symptoms such as hyperactivity and impulsivity. We may see a child running and say, "There's something wrong with that" when compared to other children of the same age, but inattention is a symptom you don't realize until you treat the person or see their academic performance."

The project is focused on undergraduate and graduate students and seeks to diagnose using physiological signals such as heart rate and the GSR signal, a technique that measures the galvanic skin response, i.e., sweating. The experiment also analyzes the brain's electrical signals and studies movement patterns. Different cognitive tests, such as the Tower of Hanoi, are also administered, and movement patterns are recorded.

"We record these variables, and from the different tests, in conjunction with the physiological signals, we provide a diagnosis or perhaps approximate a diagnosis or a tool that can be useful to the professional, whether it is implemented in adults, students, or children. That's why we chose tests that can be scaled to childhood and that can be performed by a trained physician." child without a problem,” she indicates.

So far, she adds, “we have realized that these tests have been useful in terms of the results we have obtained; they have been significant in finding these patterns that would otherwise be difficult to detect.”

The project was advised by a psychologist who has worked with people with ADHD, who advised on the design of the research protocol and helped select tests to detect certain characteristics of people with this disorder: “We are contacting psychologists to join the project for feedback. We are already working on it,” she emphasizes.

The project is in the sampling stage, and the research protocol was presented to an ethics committee, which approved it, giving us the opportunity to launch a call to the INAOE community and disseminate this to other universities to obtain a larger sample.

Finally, she mentions that Elizabeth Ortiz Bautista and Saúl Brandon Lima Portillo, BUAP medical student interns, are also working on the project. They are doing their community service in research at INAOE.