THE PROBLEM
Around 1-5 adults in the U.S suffer from mental health illnesses (“Mental Illness”, 2017). Our project is aimed to track the welfare of our patients in a more convenient and effective manner that is catered to their patient-provider relationship. Our project will act as a middleman to improve the communication between the two which will also improve the effectiveness of their sessions by getting them on the same page. This allows session time to be utilized on the treatment of the problem instead of the patient trying to communicate information in a way that the provider wants. Patients are able to relay their moods to their providers in a day to day basis versus a bi-weekly report and customize their tracking in what they personally weigh significance on. It is also significant that our app/website utilizes its features as well as creating a comprehensive data pulled from other sources to aid the provider in making a more effective assessment for treatment.
EXISTING SOLUTIONS
MoodTrack Diary
Purpose: Tracks mood over time, meant to be paired with treatment
Features: Uses keywords to track mood, social networking, shows patterns
Negatives: Poor UI, cluttered visualization
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Joyable
Purpose: Help overcome social anxiety
Features: Generate emotional profile, 5-minute cognitive behavioral therapy
Negatives: Very specific usage, not customizable
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T2 Moodtracker
Purpose: Track emotional experiences over time, uncover patterns, meant to be used with providers
Features: Generate reports, locate treatment in your area, customizable
Negatives: Poor UI, forced to enter input for all scales, broken reminder system, confusing data visualization
GAP ANALYSIS
Lack of customizability
There are no apps that are 100% customizable for the individual user and in a way that ideal for the mental health provider.
Not dual-purpose
There are no current apps that take what both the user and the therapist wants into account to help facilitate patient visits
No correlations
This type of co-interaction between different tracking metrics is currently not available on the market
No all-in-one app
Having to look at one app for sleep habits, another for mood tracking, and another for a personal diary makes it difficult for the user as they have to juggle between all their different apps to find the data they need during therapist visits
The SOLUTION
Our proposed solution to combat the gap in mobile mental health services includes a comprehensive mental health application. This will be a customizable, modular application that will aid the patient in communicating their thoughts and feelings to their therapist during sessions. During the period of time in between sessions, the patient will have the ability to record data pertaining to their mental health and have it displayed in the app in a comprehensible way. Based on a timeline set by the user, the app will generate summaries of the data collected in the time between sessions, and act as a middleman in the patient-therapist relationship.