A Computational Distributed System to Support the Treatment of Patients
with Major Depression
Help4Mood is a system to support the treatment of people who are significantly affected by depression but are still able to live at home and may also be working.
Through daily interactions with a Virtual Agent, users track how they are feeling and work through brief, simple exercises based on principles of cognitive behaviour therapy. We assess the effect of depression on overall activity through a Personal Monitoring System that collects activity and sleep data; the effect of depression on fine motor skills is assessed through simple games and speech tasks during the session with the Virtual Agent. The Decision Support component of Help4Mood plans sessions, making sure they are varied and interesting, and distils the data collected through the Virtual Agent and the Personal Monitoring System into a one-page overview that shows how the user is doing. Users and their clinicians can then use this overview to discuss progress and plan further treatment.
FVA is the Italian partner of the Help4Mood project
Funded by the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Union (ICT-2009.5.1 248765)