Moodpal

A Mental Health Tracking Application based on a Virtual Therapist

DESCRIPTION OF PURPOSE

Mental health is an area of increased interest and importance in the new millennia. Mental health issues are on a rise given the stress and complexity of modern age living. Witnessing a large number of technological interventions to find an effective solution, mental health is still an area with endless possibilities. MoodPal is an application designed to help people suffering from depression, PTSD, anxiety, suicidal tendencies and other mHealth issues.

Collaboration with the SIMS foundation, Austin TX

SIMS Foundation provides mental health and addiction recovery services for Austin musicians, music industry professionals, and their families to support the well-being of the Austin music community.
The SIMS population of mental health consumers provides a good test case for the general proposition that mobile phones are a promising platform for the delivery of evidence-based mental health self-management tools

Concept

What is MoodPal?

MoodPal is a virtual therapist based mental health app with the goal of enabling musicians and music industry workers to self-monitor and self-manage their mental health.

A detailed study of the current mHealth applications and a survey to identify desired features and usage patterns among our target population lead to invaluable insight. MoodPal is an application building on the research to help fill the gaps in current mHealth apps and create an effective mental health care solution.

What are the problem areas with potential for intervention with MoodPal?

the concept of MoodPal is based off the following questions:

How can users self-diagnose their mHealth accurately?
How to make real-time appraisals of stressors and threats, and enable positive coping responses for users?
How can users have access to preliminary therapy irrespective of time, location and financial limitations?
How can a user identify a social support network that will also be kept apprised of the user’s goals and progress?

Application Features

Creating a mental health tracking app based on a virtual therapist.

Primary Features

Secondary Features

Login & Profile creation

Considered 3 possible user scenarios for the Login and Profile creation scenario namely: New App User and new to SIMS New App User (but pre-existing SIMS member), Returning app user
The user creates a profile with basic information like name, age, gender, email-id, phone number, which he/she can modify further.

Animal based avatars used as virtual therapists

Once the user profile has been created, the user is asked to design their own avatar based on their personal preferences from a couple of options made available to them.
Empirical research suggests that users are hesitant to communicate with human therapists for fear of judgement. Animals on the other hand enable the user to invest more trust in the therapist and are more comforting in nature.
Types of animals: dog/cat/horse/rabbit/flamingo/elephant. The list of animal options derives from existing research on therapeutic animals.
The user has the option of giving their chosen animal avatar a name and gender of their choice.

Everyday mood tracking

The avatar asks a couple of questions(about 5 questions) on daily basis, all based on the idea of logging the user’s mental state, to detect any specific mental health issues that might be visible.
All the questions are derived from the following sources.
- The Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS) for suicide assessment
- GAD-7 (Generalized Anxiety Disorder) for a complete assessment of anxiety
- Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) to identify depression.
- “Alcohol Screening and Brief Intervention for Youth: A Practitioner’s Guide” to identify people at risk for alcohol-related problems.
- The Mood Disorder Questionnaire (MDQ) for bipolar disorder symptoms.
- PTSD Checklist – Civilian version (PCL-C).
All the responses are automatically logged as nominal and ordered data which is then used by the AI running in the background to derive inferences about the mental health tendencies and issues and reported in the Insights section.

4 point slider scale to record magnitude of mood- affect

Based on the nature of question, the magnitude of a certain mood/emotion affect is recorded on a 4 point scale ranging from “extremely” to “not at all”.
These recordings are converted into ordinal data type by the algorithm running in the backend which then uses the data in the process of mHealth diagnosis.

SIMS database sync

Since the system is made in collaboration with the SIMS foundation, this question is pushed out by the system only when the user logs in for the first time.
Though having a SIMS membership is not a prerequisite for a user, but if the user is an existing SIMS member, they are asked if they want to import their existing mental health history (if any) to the application for more accurate synthesis of the user mental state.

Choose your friends

The users are asked to sync their contact list with the application and mark a minimum of 3 contacts as favorites/ emergency contacts, displayed at the top of the list.
These contacts will be used as emergency contacts incase the app identifies extreme distressful symptoms from the user.
A SIMS counselor will always be in the emergency list and will be notified of the same by default in such situations.

Insights

An analysis based on the responses is presented in the insights page:
- Timeline & Data Visualization: A general trend of the users mood is presented in the form of a line graph showing mood trends over time.
- General Analysis: A general synthesis of the users mental state based on the data recorded so far is presented as a concise statement.
The user is suggested at every stage to consult with the assigned doctor from SIMS and is encouraged to present the data recorded in the app for a comprehensive examination.

Resources

A list of curated resources in the form of articles, filtered based on the user’s responses and relating to their mental state.
The resources range from encouraging articles, to physical activity, to narratives from other people who have suffered from similar conditions.
A link to the users spotify account and an health app if they are using any is also provided here. The User has an option of syncing their health data with the app to sync their logged physical activity, etc.

To experience the app yourself, please click on the interactive prototype link here for your perusal.

Application Design

DESIGN PROCESS

To know more about the design process and approach, please refer to the process deck linked here for your perusal.

INITIAL IDEAS

Adopting a similar approach as white boarding, I started recording all the abstract ideas on my sketch book.

These ideas later gave form to the current application as seen.

This approach allows me the freedom to record all my ideas, as arbitrary as they might be. No thoughts are lost over time and it enables fluid development of concepts and effective iterations.

VISUAL DESIGN

Color Scheme

Avatar Design

Branding

APPLICATION FLOW

PROJECT INSIGHTS & TRADEOFFS

How was the project perceived?

MoodPal is a virtual therapist based mental health app with the goal of enabling musicians and music industry workers to self-monitor and self-manage their mental health. A project completed for the Health Informatics class, the project received enthusiastic & positive feedback from the course instructor and collaborators.

Being a novel idea with no exact model existing as of now, some autonomous AI companies expressed interest in executing the project quoting potential for commercial success with social good. Continuing collaboration with SIMS, I am weighing the available opportunities to take this project to the next level.

Major insights and tradeoffs

The problem of mental Health at hand is a vast problem area with extensive potential for intervention and many solutions. The main challenges faced during this project were the scoping out of research inferences as the domain is vastly researched and passionately written about. There were major tradeoffs during the project progression like:

The type of avatar based virtual assistant settling on animal kind.
The level of social platform integration was another head-scratcher. The decision to explore possible intervention without obvious social platform integration opened up new avenues of solution.
Calendar sync is another feature which can be approached many ways. This app integrates the calendar in the backend without any dedicated UI’s for the same. Being an AI based app, this is a feature which is being explored further and is open to discussion.