Abstract
Personal Health Systems: The PSYCHE Project
In the last issues, we discussed the role of “personal health systems” in offering therapists significant new abilities to monitor patients' conditions, thereby enabling them to diagnose problems earlier and treat them more effectively. The EU is supporting research in this area under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7—
The required systems should aim at (a) objective and quantitative assessment of symptoms, patient condition, effectiveness of therapy, and use of medication; (b) decision support for treatment planning; and (c) provision of warnings and motivating feedback. In the cases of depression and bipolar disorders, the systems should also aim at prediction of depressive or manic episodes.
After a very demanding selection, the Commission provided financial support to the following six projects (out of more than 100 proposals), which seek to develop advanced ICT applications to develop personal health systems for mental health. One of them is the PSYCHE project:
Coordinator: Prof. Enzo Pasquale Scilingo Centro Interdipartimentale di Ricerca “E. Piaggio” Università di Pisa Via Diotisalvi, 2 56126 Pisa, Italy
E-mail:
The problem
One of the areas of great demand for the need of continuous monitoring, patient participation, and medical prediction is that of mood disorders, more specifically bipolar disorders. Due to the unpredictable and episodic nature of bipolar disorder, it is necessary to take the traditional standard procedures of mood assessment through the administration of rating scales and questionnaires and integrate this with tangible data found in emerging research on central and peripheral changes in brain function that may be associated to the clinical status and response to treatment throughout the course of bipolar disorder.
Goals of the project
In this scenario, the PSYCHE project will develop a personal, cost-effective, multiparametric monitoring system with the aim of treating and predicting depressive or manic episodes in patients diagnosed with bipolar disorder by combining wearable and portable devices with appropriate platforms and services.
The system developed by the PSYCHE project will be based on textile platforms and portable sensing devices for the long-term and short-term acquisition of data from selected class of patients affected by mood disorders. The project will develop novel portable devices for the monitoring of biochemical markers, voice analysis, and a behavioral index correlated to patient state. Additionally, brain functional studies will be performed under specific experimental protocols in order to correlate central measures with the clinical assessmen, and the parameters measured by the Psyche platform. Specifically, the project will focus on the following objectives:
a) Integration of sensors for physiological and behavioral data into a monitoring system for patients affected by bipolar disorders. b) Development of novel portable devices for the monitoring of biochemical markers, voice analysis, and a behavioral index correlated to mental illness. Special emphasis will be placed on the reliability of these systems and user acceptability. c) Implementation of an integrated system to collect data from bipolar patients. Bipolar patients in different states of the illness (e.g., mania or depression episodes, remission) will be considered. Controlled environments will enable the concurrent assessment of patient status by medical professionals, which will be used to annotate the recorded signals. The collected data, along with the subjective annotations, will be recorded in a reference database, where information from the EHR, such as medication, patient history, and exams, will be integrated. Semantic technologies will be exploited to enable content-based searches. d) Data managing: the large amount of data will be analyzed using state-of-the-art signal processing and data mining methods to correlate patient status assessment (from health professional annotations and other clinical findings) with the measured parameters. The ultimate goal is to identify signal trends indicating detection and prediction of critical events. e) User interface: once the group of patients has been selected, the most adequate input and feedback methods will be defined. Adequate devices will be chosen depending on user needs and expectations, and therefore different dialogue strategies will be defined depending on the selected devices and interaction techniques. Different techniques will be studied in order to adapt the information and presentation to the use scenarios. f) Professional interface: mental health professionals involved in PSYCHE will perform patient monitoring tasks. A user-friendly environment will be developed where, through easily formulated queries, medical professionals will be able to view current patient data, as well as information extracted from electronically stored medical files. Embedded system intelligence will allow for the modeling and prediction of patient status and will be used for the development of an alert mechanism to identify situations requiring special attention.