Complexity Index From a Personalized Wearable Monitoring System for Assessing Remission in Mental Health

Abstract

This study discusses a personalized wearable monitoring system, which provides information and communication technologies to patients with mental disorders and physicians managing such diseases. The system, hereinafter called the PSYCHE system, is mainly comprised of a comfortable t-shirt with embedded sensors, such as textile electrodes, to monitor electrocardiogram-heart rate variability (HRV) series, piezoresistive sensors for respiration activity, and triaxial accelerometers for activity recognition. Moreover, on the patient-side, the PSYCHE system uses a smartphone-based interactive platform for electronic mood agenda and clinical scale administration, whereas on the physician-side provides data visualization and support to clinical decision. The smartphone collects the physiological and behavioral data and sends the information out to a centralized server for further processing. In this study, we present experimental results gathered from ten bipolar patients, wearing the PSYCHE system, with severe symptoms who exhibited mood states among depression (DP), hypomania(HM), mixed state (MX), and euthymia (EU), i.e., the good affective balance. In analyzing more than 400 h of cardiovascular dynamics, we found that patients experiencing mood transitions from a pathological mood state (HM, DP, or MX-where depressive and hypomanic symptoms are simultaneously present) to EU can be characterized through a commonly used measure of entropy. In particular, the SampEn estimated on long-term HRV series increases according to the patients' clinical improvement. These results are in agreement with the current literature reporting on the complexity dynamics of physiological systems and provides a promising and viable support to clinical decision in order to improve the diagnosis and management of psychiatric disorders.

Combining electroencephalographic activity and instantaneous heart rate for assessing brain–heart dynamics during visual emotional elicitation in healthy subjects

“…On the other hand, changes in ANS signalling relevantly affect the CNS, both in physiological and in pathological conditions [2,4,[6][7][8][9]. Dysfunctions of the ANS were found in acute and chronic stressful conditions [10][11][12], insomnia [13,14], epilepsy [15,16], parkinsonisms [17,18], psychosomatic disorders [19] and schizophrenia, anxiety and mood disorders [6,[20][21][22][23][24], which are typically considered CNS-related conditions. Moreover, vagal nerve stimulation has been shown as an effective treatment for major depression [25,26], while relaxation techniques based on cardio-feedback are used for managing negative emotions and psychological symptoms [27,28].…”

The effect of the Quran recitation on mental health of the Iranian medical staff

“…[3] Nowadays, mental disorder is considered to be the most common psychiatric disorder of the twentieth century and one of the major problems of communities. Concerning the etiology of this disorder, the spiritual perspective as well as biological, psychological and social views is universally accepted.…”

A Wearable System for the Evaluation of the Human-Horse Interaction: A Preliminary Study

“…Hence, an increased number of measures, including further variables, is needed to clarify the phenomena involved in the human-horse interaction. In conclusion, this work poses the basis for the application of novel high level signal processing techniques for stationary and non-stationary signals [113,114], already used in investigating human-to-human interaction [115][116][117], to animals, and particularly to horses, in order to objectively reveal interesting responses of both the central and autonomic nervous system (ANS) for a particular uncommon stimulation. Moreover, the achieved results lead us to conclude that a quantitative measure of the human-horse interaction is viable, and it could be very effective in many fields of application, for example in therapy assisted by equine (EAT) [2,118] or for controlling the effect of therapeutic horseback riding [119].…”