PSYCHE project will focus on the following objectives:

i) Integration of sensors for physiological and behavioral data into a monitoring system for patients affected by bipolar disorders.

ii) Development of novel portable devices for the monitoring of biochemical markers, voice analysis and a behavioral index correlated to mental illness. Special emphasis will be placed on the reliability of these systems and user acceptability.

iii) Implementation of an integrated system to collect data from bipolar patients. Bipolar patients in different states of the illness (mania or depression episodes, remission) will be considered.
Controlled environments will enable the concurrent assessment of patient status by the medical professionals that will be used to annotate the recorded signals. The collected data along with the subjective annotations will be recorded in a reference database, where information from the EHR such as medication, patient history and exams, will be integrated. Semantic technologies will be exploited to enable content-based searches.

iv) Data managing: the large amount of data will be analyzed using state-of-the-art signal processing and data mining methods to correlate patient status assessment (from health professional annotations and other clinical findings) with the measured parameters. The ultimate goal is to identify signal trends indicating detection and prediction of critical events.

v) User interface: once the group of patients has been selected, the most adequate input and feedback methods will be defined. Adequate devices will be chosen depending on user needs and expectations, and therefore different dialogue strategies will be defined depending on the selected devices and interaction techniques. Different techniques will be studied in order to adapt the information and presentation to the use scenarios.

vi) Professional interface: mental health professionals involved in PSYCHE will perform patient monitoring tasks. A user friendly environment will be developed where, through easily formulated queries, medical professionals will be able to view current patient data as well as information extracted from electronically stored medical files. Embedded system intelligence will allow for the modeling and prediction of patient status and will be used for the development of an alert mechanism to identify situations requiring special attention.