INTEROPERABILITY AND SENSOR COMMUNICATIONS IN HELP4MOOD: PERSONAL MONITORING SYSTEM TO SUPPORT THE TREATMENT OF DEPRESSION

Help4Mood aims to develop a platform to support the treatment of people with depression in their own home. Depression is one of the main causes of disability worldwide. For depression, it is essential to have a continuous control in order to check the patient status and avoid relapses. Thus, we propose Help4Mood, which is designed as a Personal Health System. It consists of a set of different wireless sensors whose data sink is centralized on a laptop and it is administered by a clinician that supports the treatment of depression. The outcome of the platform is available to the clinician in order to check the patient's status during the periodic appointments. The use of standards contributes to improve care delivery, optimize workflow and reduce ambiguity. For this reason Help4Mood is able to communicate with the Healthcare Provider using the standard of communications protocol Health Level Seven (HL7). In this work, we describe the main components, principal features of the Help4Mood and the results from the evaluation of the activity monitoring system on patients who had recovered from depression in Catalonia, Scotland and Romania. Updates caused by the results of the evaluation in the design of Wireless Sensor Network are included.