To improve links and interaction between patients and doctors facilitating more active participation of patients as well as their relatives in care processes. Higher quality of interaction between physician and patient, and the information exchange between the two, are therefore essential for the effective care of this chronic disease.

The PSYCHE products serve this purpose: to enable physicians and patients to continuously exchange information on health and life conditions – and to have this information flow happening in a simple and timely way, thus providing a tool for improving quality of life and reducing costly episodes of clinical worsening, with the need of hospital admission. PSYCHE system will contribute to give to the patients a position of active partner in his/her care, allowing him/her, if he/she is ready for that, to take more responsibility and autonomy (detection of risky periods, application of preventive or emergency plans which have been built in a collaboration with his/her carers).

PSYCHE system could promote patient’s empowerment. New generations of individuals grow-up in an ICT environment. Bipolar and mood disorders patients belong to these new generations. They like to master the use of more or less sophisticated ICT tools. They like to share their experience with their pairs. PSYCHE system will open a new field of interactions between pairs for patients suffering of bipolar and mood disorders. Doing so it could contribute the development of mutual help network (virtual or physical) or self-help groups whose development is a strong new tendency in the field. Special attention to this aspect will be given through web tools that will be implemented in the early phase of the project. In this perspective PSYCHE will also contribute to the promotion of patient’s empowerment.

One of the main objectives of the proposed activity is the improvement of care of patients suffering from mental disorders (particularly focussed on bipolar disorders), keeping in mind that improvement is not seen only from the clinical perspective but also from the social and psychological perspective of the patient. For this reason it is mandatory that patients’ point of view is taken into very strong consideration and it will be (together with the medical doctor’s point of view) the starting point of the research activity proposed. Actual usability of the instruments will be investigated/verified in the final demonstration phase of the project while patient’s acceptance will be always under analysis and validation. To promote the acceptance and use of these technologies, it is necessary from the beginning to consider needs and expectations of end users, with special focus in patients and their carers and front line health care providers.