A Mobile Mental Health Monitoring System: A Smart Glove

Abstract

This paper proposes a mobile mental health monitoring system for the use during simple daily activities. The primary function of the system is to continuously monitors changes in skin temperature, galvanic skin resistance, and heart rate variability (inter-beat-intervals and cardiac vagal tone index). Changes in these recorded parameters can be later viewed and interpreted by an expert to provide insight about mental health and mental states. The architecture of the proposed system mainly consists of a wearable wireless multi-sensor glove, a permanent data storage unit (cloud database), and a user interface (web page). The wearable glove integrates a skin temperature sensor, a galvanic skin resistance sensor, and a pulse sensor, and it records then transmits the raw signals from the sensors through Wi-Fi to the cloud database. The data existing in the database can be retrieved, processed if needed, then displayed via the user interface. %THE SAMPLING RATE, THE TRANSMISSION RATE, AND THE CLOUD STORAGE CAPACITY The proposed system was tested for two simulated emotional situations: relaxation and annoyance. The recorded signals showed significant variability in the galvanic skin resistance and heart rate variability signals between the two situations. The proposed system can be effectively used in many fields where physiological measures are utilized to evaluate and understand human behavior and mental health. Such fields include psychophysiological research, education, performance enhancement, and biofeedback therapy.