Personalised Ambient Monitoring: Supporting Mental Health at Home

Abstract

Many who suffer from Bipolar Disorder are keen to control their disease with as little external medical intervention as possible. Self help through websites, meetings, and questionnaires are commonly employed approaches. The PAM project has worked to help this process. It has endeavoured to form an ambient system of monitoring to provide objective feedback to bipolar sufferers. Particular effort has been made to allow the system network of sensors to be personalised and ambient, and operate without the need for a centralised resource. So a sensor system that embeds the processing of the sensor data has been developed. It allows the processing to be changed at run-time to allow personalisation and for changes in behaviour over time. This chapter describes the current status of the project; in particular it describes the rule-based system that the project developed, and an initial technical trial and its outcomes. The rule-based approach and the trial description should be of general interest to both technical developers and practitioners. The latter part of the chapter however is aimed more at the technical developer and focuses on the technical outcomes from the trial with a focus on the programmability aspects and addresses consistency issues that arise with such a flexible programming environment.