PSYCHE: personalised monitoring systems for care in mental health

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. This paper presents PSYCHE system, a personal, cost-effective, multi-parametric monitoring system 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 acquired data will be processed and analyzed in the established platform that takes into account the Electronic Health Records (EHR) of the patient, a personalized data referee system, as well as medical analysis in order to verify the diagnosis and help in prognosis of the illness. Constant feedback and monitoring will be used to manage the illness, to give patients support, to facilitate interaction between patient and physician as well as to alert professionals in case of patients relapse and depressive or manic episodes income, as the ultimate goal is to identify signal trends indicating detection and prediction of critical events.