A Multi-Modal Case-Based System for Clinical Diagnosis and Treatment in Stress Management

A difficult issue in stress management is to use biomedical sensor signal in the diagnosis and treatment of stress. Clinicians often base their diagnosis and decision on manual inspection of signals such as, ECG, heart rate, finger temperature etc. However, the complexity associated with the manual analysis and interpretation of the signals makes it difficult even for experienced clinicians. A computer system, classifying the sensor signals is one valuable property assisting a clinician. This paper presents a case-based system that assist a clinician in diagnosis and treatment of stress. The system uses a finger temperature sensor and the variation in the finger temperature is one of the key features in the system. Several artificial intelligence techniques such as textual information retrieval, rule-based reasoning, and fuzzy logic have been combined together with case-based reasoning to enable more reliable and efficient diagnosis and treatment of stress. The performance has been validated implementing a research prototype and close collaboration with the experts. The experimental results suggest that such a system is valuable both for the less experienced clinicians and for experts where the system may be seen as a second option.