A Novel Middleware Solution to Improve Ubiquitous Healthcare Systems Aided by Affective Information

The arousal of emotion might have consequences for physical health is a broadly acknowledged idea. Therapy for depression, prevention for heart pathologies, and rehabilitation treatments for drug addiction are just a few examples of application domains that may benefit from technologies capable of monitoring, detecting, representing, and disseminating information pertaining to patients' physical and psychological/emotional states. However, the design and development of healthcare applications of this kind is a rather challenging issue that requires to integrate sensor infrastructures, which are able to detect changes in patients' physiological and emotional states, and of sharing this information to interested caregivers, such as professional medical staff, relatives, and friends. This paper proposes the Pervasive Environment for AffeCtive Healthcare (PEACH) framework, a middleware level support for affective healthcare that incarnates these ideas and describes its effective functions in a drug addiction treatment application scenario.