Mobile phones as medical devices in mental disorder treatment: an overview

Abstract

Mental disorders can have a significant, negative impact on sufferers' lives, as well as on their friends and family, healthcare systems and other parts of society. Approximately 25 % of all people in Europe and the USA experience a mental disorder at least once in their lifetime. Currently, monitoring mental disorders relies on subjective clinical self-reporting rating scales, which were developed more than 50 years ago. In this paper, we discuss how mobile phones can support the treatment of mental disorders by (1) implementing human-computer interfaces to support therapy and (2) collecting relevant data from patients' daily lives to monitor the current state and development of their mental disorders. Concerning the first point, we review various systems that utilize mobile phones for the treatment of mental disorders. We also evaluate how their core design features and dimensions can be applied in other, similar systems. Concerning the second point, we highlight the feasibility of using mobile phones to collect comprehensive data including voice data, motion and location information. Data mining methods are also reviewed and discussed. Based on the presented studies, we summarize advantages and drawbacks of the most promising mobile phone technologies for detecting mood disorders like depression or bipolar disorder. Finally, we discuss practical implementation details, legal issues and business models for the introduction of mobile phones as medical devices.

Exploring User Needs for a Mobile Behavioral-Sensing Technology for Depression Management: Qualitative Study (Preprint)

“…This makes mobile phones a viable platform for mental illnesses diagnosis and management [7,18]. Among the pioneer projects, the MONARCA project used a variety of phone sensors such as GPS and accelerometer to detect the mental states as well as changes in mental states of bipolar patients [9]. In their study that involved 12 patients over a period of 12 weeks, they have shown that mobile behavioral sensing system could identify both depression and mania states with an accuracy of more than 70% and detect state-change with very high precision and recall [10] .…”

Treatment Planning in Smart Medical: A Sustainable Strategy

“…Smart medical industries emphasize users' intelligence and experiences, an efficient treatment plan evaluation is facilitating these industries sharply [10,11]. During the evaluation of a treatment plan, users usually describe and evaluate them in natural language [8], such as 1 T generates a little bit pollution, costs much money, has rare side effects during diagnosis 2 T generates a lot of pollution, costs a little money, has relatively high side effects during diagnosis Based on the above observations, the question of, "Which treatment plan is the sustainable one and how should they be evaluated?"…”

Smartwatch Applications for Mental Health: A Qualitative Analysis of the Users� Perspectives

“…Mobile and wearable solutions have a large potential in this domain (Gravenhorst, 2015), especially when their abilities to collect data continuously are considered. The knowledge gained through comprehensive data collection and analysis in large scales benefist not only patients at an individual levels, but also the community (Picard, 2001).…”

“…Several mobile and wearable applications have been proposed (Gravenhorst, 2015), and are available for download in the Android market and Apple store (iTunes). Despite a significant growth in the availability of mobile apps in the past years, little is known about the characteristics of these applications and the end users' perspectives about them, especially considering novel smart watch applications dedicated to promote mental health.…”