MADRIM: A major depression remote intelligent monitor

One of the challenges for the patients diagnosed with major depression is not to experience relapse or reoccurrence which are very common characteristics of major depression. Providing constant monitoring of these patients during their daily life for the first year of their depression can have a significant impact on preventing these patients to experience reoccurrence and relapse. In this article a Major Depression Remote Intelligent Monitor, called MADRIM is presented. The main goal of MADRIM is to follow the evolution of the patient during his/her recovery in order to understand its behavior and to prevent the patient from relapse or reoccurrence. MADRIM is based on qualitative reasoning and defines a rule base model that processes a set of heterogeneous information related to the patient with the goal of monitoring and assessing his/her process of healing. MADRIM has been tested through a scenario evaluation. A set of prototyped patients are generated using expert knowledge and, this patient data set is then used to validate the intelligent monitor. The results obtained were satisfactory from the psychiatric point of view. Real patient studies are planned for the near future.