Undergraduate Students’ Stress, Anxiety and Depression Remote Health Monitoring System

Abstract

Mental health such as stress, anxiety and depression have been on the rise in recent time among different groups of people in the emerging challenging society and especially among university students. University is a place where most adolescents would experience a change phase in life, discovering their identity as well as experiencing several challenges. All these pressures might cause students to suffer from anxiety or stress or in some cases severe depression, which could lead them to isolate themselves from other people, or to have poor academic performance or very low self-esteem as well as dropping out from the universities. This is quite a dangerous trend because if such students are not treated early, the chances for their situation to worsen or ultimately attempting suicide would be high. Several technologies have been utilised to help assist clinicians and patients to confront and help mitigate health problems. Technologies such as eHealth, or mHealth which utilises smartphones and remote patient monitoring systems (RPMS) have been widely used in the healthcare and are proven to be efficient and quite reliable to help those who suffer from health issues. In this project, a remote mental health monitoring system(RMHMS) has been proposed to enable lecturers as well as university administration and therapists/counsellors to track students’ level of stress, anxiety and depression and swiftly engage those who suffer from stress, anxiety and depressive symptoms. Students who suffer from severe stress, anxiety symptoms and depression, will be given more attention by the university’s administrations based on the information available from the remote mental health monitoring system. The proposed system will help facilitate early interventions and treatment such as referrer to counselling sessions or seeking psychiatric help. The system equally incorporates alert systems to students’ friends or families and their caregivers to intimate them of their situation too so that they may help the students to overcome their mental health issues before getting worsened.