ICare-stress: An integrated mental health software

Abstract

© 2017 IEEE. Not only the psychiatric problem is complicated but screening and diagnosing processes also consume much time to get better treatment. Currently, there is a scarce number of psychiatrists and tools for helping people to assess and manage their level of anxiety and depression. This research extended our previous work on detecting stress using brainwave and neurofeedback [14] to invent an Integrated Mental Health Software tool for early screening, detection, diagnosis, and early treatment mobile application called 'Intelligent Caring System for Stress' or 'iCare-Stress'. Based on the expert's recommendation, iCare-Stress uses the set of most efficient and evidence-based screening tools which are General Health Questionnaire (GHQ), Patient Health Questionnaire-4 (PHQ-4), Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7(GAD-7), and Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9). Moreover, the psychoeducation of the basic knowledge of diseases and how to handle them by using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is provided. This work proposed the iCare-Stress system architecture and its prototype. The fundamental usability test has been done by the medical and non-medical testers and the result shows a high satisfactory level from both groups. The ultimate goal of iCare-Stress aims to help people to understand the psychiatric problem early and a timely diagnosis would be done to result in better treatment outcome which will reduce effects to both individual and others.