Mental health mobile applications (apps for your phone, generally) can do things like track your mood, track your sleep and are targeted at different populations like people with posttraumatic stress disorder or depression. But there are gaps in the marketplace, things that are not currently being addressed by mental health mobile applications. So my question is for you, if you could have any mental health mobile application, what would it be?
Existing Mental Health Apps
If you’re new to the world of mental health mobile apps, I’ve done reviews on a mood-tracker I like and a sleep-tracker I also use.
What Do You Want in a New Mental Health Mobile Application?
I’m working with Global Medical Education to research what people are looking for in terms of a mental health mobile application. We’ve identified several types of applications (including psychosis early intervention) that we think people might want, but I’m sure you have some great ideas that we haven’t thought of. So, please, do me a favor and take this very short survey on mental health mobile apps and let me know your thoughts. I know sometimes people don’t like surveys but I promise, this one is short and is one wherein we really do care about your opinion.
As a thank you for taking the survey, you’ll be entered to win a Starbucks gift card. Happy lattes to you.
Thanks for your help with this. I always think it’s best to get the opinions from as many real life folks as possible before making design decisions and, hopefully, you’ll see your idea fresh off the press sometime soon.
I would like a mood tracker that I could log several times a day. I deal with ultradian cycling which means my moods change often most days.
What an awesome thread – I see heaps of potential in this space. I already like this thread!
I see that a lot of the apps available seem to track only one thing in particular. It’s great that they’re able to help identify patterns but I think that to get closer to root-cause analysis were need to be able to track multiple elements: such as sleep, eating, exercise, hydration, etc .,…
Each element should be tracked at a minimum by pattern (regularity), quantity and quality.
I.e. How often do people eat each day? How much do they eat? What did they eat? (With a database that helps to identify let minerals and vitamins within food).
Or how often do they sleep? For how long? What is the quality (I.e. How deep was the sleep? Was sleep interrupted? Was it in lounge with standard healthy sleep cycles? Is bed time, duration, wake up time and quality regular or haphazard?)
Hopefully this could also help to drive better lifestyle choices, regardless of mental illness.
This may not be achievable via a single app and might need an app that can integrate with individual trackers to then correlate patterns. It would be a great opportunity to standardize on how these apps share data.
I have some experience in this field – happy to help if it’s useful :)