Enabling health, independence and wellbeing for psychiatric patients through personalised ambient monitoring (PAM)

英国十分之一的人口将在生命的某个阶段遭受致残性焦虑症，而由于心理健康问题，每年损失9100万个工作日，国家损失的生产力和治疗费用为320亿英镑。除了对整个国家造成的财政负担外，当然还有个人、家人和朋友的个人费用（www.mind.org.uk）。最近，卫生服务国务部长罗西·温特顿宣布，政府将通过提供药物信息，帮助患有癌症或精神健康问题等长期疾病的人保持独立并控制他们的疾病。PAM（个性化环境监测）将进一步推动这一点，允许患者选择现成的技术来监测他们的活动特征;行为模式的测量表明人们的心理健康状态。PAM将在一个人的家中使用一组多个离散的传感器，连接到一个计算机系统，该系统被编程为检测活动特征的变化。然后，这些可以用来向病人、他们的家人或他们的医生发出自动警报，从而提供避免衰弱发作的能力。这将通过纵向监测来实现，以便及早发现健康状况恶化，防止可避免的住院。这项工作将以南安普顿大学在这一领域的现有工作为基础（包括即将向环境和社会研究中心提出的关于应用于康复监测的类似相关技术的建议）。诺丁汉大学的投入将扩大目前在常规和职业卫生领域的生理监测工作，同时他们参与EPSRC资助的卫生技术评估IMRC将提供一种机制，以潜在地评估该项目的真正价值。斯特林大学已经通过MATCH在这一领域开展工作，并拥有一个稳定的中间件平台，但在本项目的早期阶段，我们将评估该平台，特别是我们将与EPSRC EQUATOR项目就分布式健康监测演示器中使用的中间件进行联系。研究人员提供医疗设备和传感器，医疗信号处理，通信和软件服务以及运筹学建模。这种组合是项目成功的关键，并提供了一个有趣的和独特的跨学科的分组。IDEAS沙坑提供了一个独特的机会来形成这样一种积极的关系。

One in ten of the UK population will suffer a disabling anxiety disorder at some stage in their life whilst 91 million working days are lost per year due to mental health problems and the cost to the country is 32 billion in lost productivity and treatment costs. In addition to this financial burden to the country as a whole there are of course the personal costs to individuals, their family and friends (www.mind.org.uk). Recently Rosie Winterton, the Minister of State for Health Services, announced the Government will help people with long-term conditions such as cancer, or mental health problems, to stay independent and take control of their illness by providing information with medication. PAM (personalised ambient monitoring) will take this even further by allowing patients to select off-the-shelf technology that will monitor their activity signatures ; measurements of behavioural patterns which indicate people's mental health state. PAM will use a set of multiple discreet sensors in a person's home, coupled to a computer system programmed to detect changes in activity signatures. These can then be used to issue automatic alerts to the patient, their family, or their doctor, thus providing the capability to avert debilitating episodes.This pilot study will investigate the feasibility of reducing the incidence of debilitating episodes. This will be achieved by longitudinal monitoring that will permit early detection of deteriorating health and prevent avoidable hospital admissions. This work will build on existing work in this area at the University of Southampton (ISVR and CORMSIS) (that includes an imminent proposal to EPSRC on similar related technology applied to rehabilitation monitoring). University of Nottingham input will extend current work in physiological monitoring in both the conventional and vocational health domains whilst their involvement in the EPSRC funded health technology assessment IMRC will provide a mechanism to potentially assess the project's true value. The University of Stirling already operates in this domain via MATCH and has a stable middleware platform, however at an early stage in this project we will assess the platform, and in particular we will liaise with the EPSRC EQUATOR project regarding use of middleware developed for used in a distributed health monitoring demonstrator.The investigators provide skills and experience across medical devices and sensors, medical signal processing, communications and software services, and Operational Research modelling. This mix is essential to the success of the project, and provides an interesting and distinct interdisciplinary grouping. The IDEAS sandpit has provided a unique opportunity to form such a positive relationship.