Towards Situation-aware Mobile Applications in Mental Health

Abstract

This work describes SituMan (Situation Manager), a mobile system that makes use of the sensors commonly included in most mobile platforms and a fuzzy inference engine to attempt to infer user context and environment. Such "situation" information, has been used to enhance the behaviour of MoodBuster, another mobile application used in the scope of the mental health domain to collect Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMA). EMA has been used in psychotherapy to minimize the effects of recall bias in the assessment of patient mood, as well as in the recollection of other experiences and behaviours. SituMan can enhance the user experience in the scope of EMA by prompting users in the desired situation, instead of at random or fixed-times, thus reducing obtrusiveness. It can also provide new insight to mental health professionals by summarizing the situations experienced by the patient, further allowing correlation of situation information with patient mood within the same time frame.