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Late updated: 2023-09-20
emdr-lightbar.org
is a web application developed by me at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdowns. I was undergoing EMDR therapy at the time, and struggled with doing it over Zoom, to the point where it just wasn't effective anymore. This was tragic because up to that point, EMDR had been a transformative mode of therapy for me. There were not freely available web applications that enabled therapists to administer EMDR remotely, so I decided to create one. It is fully open source, licensed under the AGPLv3.
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy is a form of therapy that is used to treat a cluster of anxiety and post-trauma related disorders. I have complex PTSD and the difference in certain aspects of my personal life before and after undergoing EMDR treatment is night and day. Things that were impossible for me before EMDR are now at least manageable if not actually enjoyable. It does not fix everything, but it really did change my life. That’s why I created a free EMDR lightbar website.
The application uses server-sent events (SSE) to coordinate the lightbar between the therapist and client's computers. The therapist can observe the lightbar's movement, start and stop it, and adjust settings for their client. Any settings changed by the therapist are immediately reflected in the client's browser.
The original implementation used web-sockets, but this added significant and unnecessary complexity. Because the "syncing" is uni-directional (therapist to client), it's much simpler to implement use SSE to send events to the client whenever the therapist sends a request to the server with updated settings (including starting and stopping). Even if the client's side eventually syncs some information to the therapist (e.g., viewport width), there's no real reason why the therapist couldn't also receive these settings via SSE.
There are three main things that need to improve about the current application: