Help4Mood

Help4Mood: supporting people with major depression and their clinicians

The European FP7 Project Help4Mood aims to develop a platform to support the treatment of patients with depression, one of the main causes of disability worldwide, in community.

Help4Mood is designed as Personal Health System administered by a clinician that supports the treatment of depression. The platform is structured around patient sessions and focused on monitoring symptoms and engaging the patient in activities base on Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, the most effective non-pharmaceutical treatment for depression.

It collects rich cognitive, psychomotor, and motor data through a Personal Monitoring System and a Virtual Agent, which is then analysed by a Decision Support System; analysis results are fed back to patients and their treating clinicians.

For this ambitious, pan-European project, a consortium of eight partners has joined forces. The University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, UK), coordinates the project and is responsible for the technical scientific management. Babes Bolyai University, (Romania), is the clinical scientific leader and will be working with clinicians locally and from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and the Parque Sanitario Sant Joan de Déu de Sant Boi, Spain. The other partners are Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh, UK), specialists in creating robust voice interfaces for computer systems, Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña (Barcelona, Spain), experts in biomedical sensing and monitoring, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (Valencia, Spain), specialists in clinical decision support, FVA (Rome, Italy), an innovative graphics and web design agency, i2CAT (Barcelona, Spain), specialists for interoperability in Healthcare Information Systems, transfer technology and dissemination, and OBSMedical (Abingdon, UK), an international company that provides innovative solutions for telemedicine and eHealth.

For more information, visit the Help4Mood project website (www.help4mood.info) or meet i2cat representatives at the Med-e-Tel 2013 expo and hear about the Help4Mood project in one of the sessions of the Med-e-Tel conference program that will focus on "eHealth & Social Wellbeing".

Design for All Award

The Design for All Award to Life 2.0!!

Design for All Foundation has granted Life 2.0 project with the Living Lab category award during International Design For All Foundation Awards 2013 ceremony, which took place 20th March during International Design Biennial in Saint-Étiene (France). The award has been given to Saara Newton, from our Finland team, during the award ceremony.

The International Design for All Foundation Awards recognise public, private and not-for-profit initiatives from across the world which aim to enable everyone to participate in society on an equal basis. In so doing, they draw international attention to examples of best practice in Design for All.

Life 2.0 is a cofinanced project by the European Commission under CIP ICT-PSP program project, participated by i2CAT’s eHealth area, aiming to improve elderly social interaction through new ICT technologies.

Casals en Xarxa

Connecting elderly people through new technologies

“Casals en Xarxa” (Network of Elderly Activity Centers) aims to connect various elderly activity centers distributed in the Catalonia region (Spain) with a low cost videoconference system. This system is used by the elderly activity centers or “Casals” to jointly participate in activities or to exchange experiences among participants localized in different cities. In addition, the system allows elderly people with any physical impairment that cannot move to the “Casal” to participate in its activities. Home participation is assisted by volunteers who visit these people at their home and is implemented through a tabletPC application.

The project is developed by i2CAT with the support of Welfare and Family Department of Catalan Government and funded by Vodafone Foundation Spain.

Global Tele Rehabilitation System

Microsoft Kinect in a tele rehabilitation system for post stroke patients 

GTRS (Global Tele Rehabilitation System) is a project meant to develop a tele rehabilitation platform in order to support tele rehabilitation exercises of post stroke patients at home. Stroke is the most important cause of disability and the second cause of dementia in Spain. The rehabilitation has to be uninterrupted and also has to be as often as possible. From this need comes the opportunity to use ICT resources in order to improve some aspects of the rehabilitation.

Due to the high number of patients that need rehabilitation after suffering a stroke, it’s not possible to provide a long rehabilitation to all of them. As a consequence of this, patients only receive the adequate rehabilitation during a few months. The stroke rehabilitation has two phases: during the first one the patient remains in the hospital and does rehabilitation with the hospital professionals regularly, during the second one the patient does the rehabilitation at home. In most cases, this rehabilitation is not taken seriously enough and the visits with the rehabilitation doctors are less frequent that it would be desired. This fact provokes that so many patients have to go back to the hospital after some time because of related problems caused by insufficient rehabilitation at home after the stroke.

One of the main goals is to track the rehabilitation process and give continuity to all the process until the patient is completely recovered. The system tracks the patient articulations while they are doing rehabilitation exercises and gives feedback to both patient and doctor. In order to be able to track the exercise, the platform includes a Microsoft Kinect responsible of picking all the articulation data and giving it as an input to a movement detection algorithm. The platform includes also a touch screen computer that make easier to the patient the interaction with the platform and a 3G dongle that provide a good connectivity with the servers of the system. The second module of the platform is a web application that supports access from patients and doctors. Patients can see their remaining exercises of the rehabilitation process, their evolution and their dates with doctors from the reference hospital. On the other side, the doctors can plan the dates and exercises of their patients as well as call them using a videoconference tool included in the platform.

The project is still in its development phase, the collaborator entities in this project are i2Cat Foundation, Vodafone Spain Foundation and Vall d’Hebron Research Institute.