Digital and computational innovations for posttraumatic stress disorder: How digital technologies can improve...

Understanding trauma-related psychopathology increasingly requires tools capable of capturing how symptoms and underlying mechanisms unfold across real-world contexts. Traditional assessments, which depend on retrospective recall and intermittent clinical contact, are limited in their ability to reflect the dynamic and context-sensitive processes that shape trauma-related mental health outcomes. Emerging digital health technologies and computational approaches address this gap by enabling the continuous measurement of behavior and physiology, whereas biological markers provide mechanistic insights into processes such as stress-related neuroendocrine, autonomic, immune, and sleep-wake functioning that reflect the biological embedding of trauma over time. This review integrates recent advances in digital and biological measurement in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and outlines principles for combining these approaches within computational frameworks. We emphasize the importance of grounding digital proxies in established biological theory; modeling intraindividual dynamics rather than relying solely on cross-sectional group differences; and integrating multimodal behavioral, physiological, and contextual data. We further highlight essential considerations for ethical, inclusive, and methodologically rigorous implementation, including privacy-by-design, data quality, and clinical interpretability. Together, these approaches support a more mechanistic, dynamic, and personalized understanding of trauma-related risk and recovery, with the potential to enhance early risk stratification and guide preventive and individualized models of care.