healthyMind_mobileApp

Description

Based on recent findings (Wasil et al.,2020), it has been shown that majority of people struggling with mental health do not receive the help they require. This highlights the ongoing and growing issue of untreated mental health issues and unrecognized onset of mental health problems. Hence, our project will focus on developing an app where the user will be able to report their feelings and emotions daily, refer to previous dates and receive feedback from the app where to seek further help and other suggestions. We decided on this solution as it has been shown that the idea of mobile apps for mental health has been met with support and interest (Ng et al.,2019) increasing the likelihood of the user interacting with the app daily. Our vision also includes it being used as a tool for mental health therapists who, if needed, can assign this to their patients to log their daily emotions as a substitution for daily diaries or as an addition to it, as previous evidence has shown that technology-based interventions have a high ability to fill the growing treatment issues. Furthermore, the user would have an option to share their data and records with their therapist, if they so wish, allowing the doctor to prepare for the coming session beforehand. Some of the features included in the app will be sleep self-report, daily emotion catalog and exposure report. Adequate sleep and sleep quality is a significant factor for healthy and well rested mind. While sleep related problems, such as insomnia, have been recorded to negatively influence person’s mental state and even increase the chances of psychotic episodes (Freeman et al.,2017). Additionally, anger, distress, happiness, disgust, calmness, and anxiety as some of the most common emotions can potentially be a sign of onset mental health issues or serve as variables describing ongoing mental struggles. Another factor influencing the state of healthy mind is exposure. We decided to include this variable into our app as there is very few instances where we found it being discussed. There are two parts of the exposure we will record. First being the pollution level of the user’s location. This is important to consider as one of the factors negatively influencing healthy brain development is indeed airborne pollutants (Manis et al.,2022), which can lead to various mental health issues. The onset of depression can also be affected by any community disasters happening around the person (Tomita et al.,2022). Our group envisioned this variable to be assessed and affected by the current social media handles in the user’s area related to community events, however, due to the time given to develop this project we will ask the user to self-report this data. The plan for our app includes AI based predictions, sentiment analysis for environment around the user, added connections to closest available specialists, automatic sleep analysis instead of self-report and more interactions, such as diet plans and activities.