Real-time monitoring and diagnostics of the person’s emotional state and decision-making in extreme situations for healthcare

Abstract

Monitoring and diagnosing the emotional state is important for varied professional groups, especially, those involve in hazardous work, risks, and high responsibility (pilots, astronauts, miners, sailors, firefighters, military personnel, law enforcement officers, etc.). These professions are definitely extreme. Moreover, the number of these professions and people engaged in them is constantly increasing. Unfortunately, disorders of the emotional state are not easily recognized by visible symptoms, so prompt remote diagnosis and monitoring of a person's emotional state is important, especially in conditions of complex geography, lack of transportation and mobility of patients, reduced financial resources, or lack of medical staff. In many cases, effective supports from various participants involved in a difficult situation that could become dangerous are required to make a timely decision. The authors, who have aviation experience in operational detection of deviations in the pilot's emotional state and decision making under risk, propose to apply the concept of mental activity, which is based on the property of the mind to slow down or speed up the flow of subjective time in relation to the real one, for the monitoring and diagnosing the emotional state of a person. For the timely detection of a hazardous emotional state of a person in an extreme situation, the phase plane method is used, the essence of which is to build phase trajectories for differential equations in the coordinate system. The identification of a person's emotional state in real time is based on the variance analysis of the models of spontaneous (optimal), emotional and rational activities. The deformity of the emotional state is determined using a priori person’s models based on the actual material of a posteriori research of the accident investigations. The Nyquist criterion is used to measure the functional stability of a person. The method of real-time diagnostics of the person’s emotional state is presented. A software “Diagnostics of the emotional state of a human-operator” is developed. The problem of effective monitoring and diagnostics of a person's emotional state can be solved with the help of an Intelligent Remote Monitoring System (IRMS) built on the basis of dynamic modeling principles, when the subsystems are formalized in the form of transfer functions. A person is considered as a control object, and the monitoring and diagnostics of the emotional state are based on the analysis of the phase portrait obtained by the control device. The conceptual model and the functional diagram of medical IRMS are worked out. The algorithm for monitoring and diagnosing the person’s emotional state is presented. Mikhailov and Nyquist criteria are used to determine the IRMS stability; Mikhailov and Nyquist hodographs are built. IRMS is proposed for monitoring the emotional state of a person in medicine, sports, treatment, and for automated monitoring of persons in hazardous environments, for example, in an aeroplane (passengers), in a smart home (people), in medicine (patients), etc. Prompt monitoring and diagnosis enables timely adjustment and improvement of a person's emotional state and prevents the development of an extreme situation towards worsening. Based on the objective-subjective collaborative decision-making method under uncertainty, the problem of urgent delivery of medical cargo using UAV from the point of departure to the destination is solved. The optimal decision with minimum risk and maximum safety according to the Wald-Wald, Wald-Laplace, and Wald-Hurwitz criteria and with the consideration of all participants’ opinions on UAV transportation, is found. Based on the dynamic programming method, the task of finding a route with minimum cost is solved when it is necessary to urgently deliver medicines to a seriously ill patient using UAV.