Help4Mood is a project inside 7th European Framework Programme (FP7) for developing a computational distributed system to support remotely the treatment of patients with major depression at home. Core components are integrated with the ICE framework. One of the main goals of this system is to use the paradigm of a Virtual Agent to support the first symptoms of clinician alert of a patient, to interact with him an to prevent some causes of relapse after monitoring he/she with different sensors. The system processes inputs from different devices for monitoring patient activity at home and how he/she sleeps (also know as the Personal Monitoring System), transmitting this data to a Decision Support System, and defining how a Virtual Agent should interact with the patient before clinical support from hospital is needed if an alert is detected. This data is transmitted by a wireless network designed to improve data communication from sensors in a home environment (easy of installation and maintenance) and implemented using customized protocols and algorithms for reducing power consumption of these sensors. The technical framework is using open source implementations of ICE and HL7-standard-based healthcare integration engines to interact with the different subsystems. Particularly, the use of these standards will contribute to commercialization of the project results and the potential impact through the development, dissemination and use.

Peer Reviewed