Adjustment of Medical Observations Influenced by Emotional State

Research in neurophysiology and neuropsychology have established a strong dependence between emotion, subjectivity and decision-making. Otherwise, medical observations are used as one of the main inputs of clinical decision support systems (CDSS) which are designed to support patients with chronic progressive diseases. However, these observations are influenced when confronted with a critical emotional state and they are likely to be subjective. To generate efficient results, CDSS must bring these subjective observations closer to the reality by using data describing the observer's emotional state. To solve this issue, the authors of this article propose to identify the dependency relationship between observations and emotions. Then they provide a solution that moderates the patient and caregivers' observations within a medical decision support system, so that it can generate efficient results. Finally, they propose two fuzzy systems to adjust the influence of emotional state on medical observation. These two systems make the medical observation closer to the current condition of the patient.