Toward a ubiquitous model to assist the treatment of people with depression
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LONG PAPER
Toward a ubiquitous model to assist the treatment of people with depression Milene Martini Petry1 · Jorge Luis Victória Barbosa1 · Sandro José Rigo1 · Lucas Pfeiffer Salomão Dias1 · Paulo César Büttenbender1
© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract The World Health Organization predicts that by 2020, depression will be the second-most common cause of debility. Also, ubiquitous computing advances are offering people and applications the necessary information for the most diversified necessities. In this sense, researchers are using ubiquitous health in applications focused on mental health and well-being. This article proposes Hígia, a model to assist in the treatment of people suffering from depression. Hígia detects the need to contact the caregivers of a depressed person, based on the users’ historical context, allowing a faster response action. Hígia constantly evaluates patients’ characteristics on social networks, emails, and interactions with smartphones, computers, or other devices. Hígia also proposes the monitoring of users’ displacements. A prototype was developed and applied in an evaluation involving users and psychologists. The results showed 85.7% of acceptance regarding perceived ease of use by users and that 100% agree, partially or totally, about the system utility. These results were encouraging and show the potential for implementing Hígia in real-life situations. Keywords Depression · Tracking system · Medical ontology · Intelligent agents
1 Introduction According to the World Health Organization (WHO), mental disorders affect 25% of all people at some point in their life. These disorders are universal and can affect anyone. Also, according to the WHO, the negative impact on the quality of patients’ lives and their relatives is massive [39]. Depression is a public health problem that is associated with functional impairment, high morbidity, and mortality. WHO estimates that by 2020, depression can be the second-leading cause of disability worldwide [29]. The number of cases identified in 2015 exceeds 322 million people [40], and this total number reflects a 14.9% increase since 2005. The ubiquitous computing paradigm [28, 37] considers that the computational resources are available in an omnipresent way, in daily life and assume the purpose of offering * Lucas Pfeiffer Salomão Dias [email protected] 1
Applied Computing Graduate Program (PPGCA) of University of Vale do Rio dos Sinos (UNISINOS), Av. Unisinos, 950 – Bairro Cristo Rei, São Leopoldo, RS CEP: 93.022‑750, Brazil
people and applications the necessary information for the most diversified necessities. As discussed by Vianna and Barbosa [34], the application of ubiquitous computing in health is called u-Health or pervasive health [9, 18]. Applications are commonly centered in hospital routine management [5, 23], patients monitoring [1, 23], or well-being [7, 18]. Studies of distributed systems with mobility have driven the increase in the use of mobile devices and the exploration of new t
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