Presentation at the 31st IEEE International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems (CBMS 2018);

Lakshmi Prasath Muniandi, Karlstad, Sweden, 19 June 2018, 16:10 PM

Mobile applications can help patients with a chronical disease to record their Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMA) and to get a more precise impression of how their disease manifests itself during day and night and over longer time periods. Such crowdsensing applications contribute to patient empowerment, in which patients monitor their disease and, sometimes, learn to cope better with it. An open question is whether physicians can also be helped in assisting their patients, by understanding similarities and differences in the patients' evolution. 
We study the EMA of patients with the chronical disease tinnitus, as recorded with the mobile crowdsensing application Track Your Tinnitus. We propose a method that captures similarities in patient evolution, taking account of the differences in the frequency of each patient's EMA recordings. We incorporate this method into a complete workflow that encompasses following components: an algorithm that captures similarities among patients on the basis of their registration data, a method that juxtaposes static patient similarity to EMA-based patient similarity, and a method that identifies those subspaces of the static feature space and those of the EMA-based feature space, which are mainly contributing to patient similarity. We report on our results for the time period recordings from 2014 till 2017 of 450 tinnitus patients from the University Medicine Regensburg.