Remote Digital Psychiatry: MindLogger for Mobile Mental Health Assessment and Therapy

Abstract

BackgroundUniversal access to assessment and treatment of mental health and learning disorders remains a significant and unmet need. There is a vast number of people without access to care because of economic, geographic, and cultural barriers as well as limited availability of clinical experts who could help advance our understanding of mental health.ObjectiveTo create an open, configurable software platform to build clinical measures, mobile assessments, tasks, and interventions without programming expertise. Specifically, our primary requirements include: an administrator interface for creating and scheduling recurring and customized questionnaires where end users receive and respond to scheduled notifications via an iOS or Android app on a mobile device. Such a platform would help relieve overwhelmed health systems, and empower remote and disadvantaged subgroups in need of accurate and effective information, assessment, and care. This platform has potential to advance scientific research by supporting the collection of data with instruments tailored to specific scientific questions from large, distributed, and diverse populations.MethodsWe conducted a search for tools that satisfy the above requirements. We designed and developed a new software platform called “MindLogger” that exceeds the above requirements. To demonstrate the tool’s configurability, we built multiple “applets” (collections of activities) within the MindLogger mobile application and deployed several, including a comprehensive set of assessments underway in a large-scale, longitudinal, mental health study.ResultsOf the hundreds of products we researched, we found 10 that met our primary requirements above with 4 that support end-to-end encryption, 2 that enable restricted access to individual users’ data, 1 that provides open source software, and none that satisfy all three. We compared features related to information presentation and data capture capabilities, privacy and security, and access to the product, code, and data. We successfully built MindLogger mobile and web applications, as well as web browser-based tools for building and editing new applets and for administering them to end users. MindLogger has end-to-end encryption, enables restricted access, is open source, and supports a variety of data collection features. One applet is currently collecting data from children and adolescents in our mental health study, and other applets are in different stages of testing and deployment for use in clinical and research settings.ConclusionsWe have demonstrated the flexibility and applicability of the MindLogger platform through its deployment in a large-scale, longitudinal, mobile mental health study, and by building a variety of other mental health-related applets. With this release, we encourage a broad range of users to apply the MindLogger platform to create and test applets to advance health care and scientific research. We hope that increasing availability of applets designed to assess and administer interventions will facilitate access to health care in the general population.

Test–retest reliability and agreement of remote home-based functional capacity self-administered assessments in community-dwelling, socially isolated older adults

“…Previous studies have shown that supervised functional capacity assessments are reliable in clinical and home settings. Recently, remote assessment applications have been demonstrated in various populations, including people living with cancer, 17 those with mobility disorders, 14 individuals with mental health conditions, 15 people living with type 2 diabetes, 16 and community-dwelling older adults 11 – 13 .…”

“… 10 Previous studies have shown that supervised functional capacity assessments are reliable in clinical and home settings. Recently, studies have shown remote assessment applications in different populations, including community-dwelling older adults, 11 – 13 people living with mobility disorders, 14 mental health conditions, 15 diabetes mellitus type 2, 16 and cancer. 17 Web-based technologies using asynchronous and synchronous instructions have proven feasible and acceptable in community-dwelling older adults after minor injury 18 and in frail older adults, 19 becoming a promising opportunity that should be further explored.…”

Quantified Us: A group-in-the-loop approach to team network reconstruction

“…In this study we introduce the CoSo platform for team interaction studies. Compared to other app-based survey collection softwares [13,14], CoSo is designed to be deployed across a large number of teams with a focus on gathering intra-and inter-team interactions through activity reports and surveys on team interactions. Moreover, CoSo uses gamification strategies within the app and data visualizations to promote engagement.…”

“…To enhance such quantitative insights, recent studies in health and psychiatry [14,24] have leveraged digital mobile applications that use active methods of experience sampling, including explicit self-reports that may range from occasional and detailed survey instruments to more frequent, brief and in-the-moment questionnaires that are referred to as "ecological momentary assessment" (EMA). EMA offers a number of major benefits over traditional survey instruments including the reduction of retrospective bias, realtime tracking of dynamic processes, simultaneous integration of multi-level data, characterization of context-specific relationships, inclusion of interactive feedback, and enhanced generalizability of results [25].…”

Human-Centric Lighting Research and Policy in the Melanopsin Age

“…However, for sample sizes that may yield evidence for the genetic underpinnings, there are no convenient assays for NIF function that can be deployed at scale. Ways forward could lie in a variety of different techniques, including miniaturized wearable light sensors (Casson, 2023;Hartmeyer & Andersen, 2023;Hartmeyer et al, 2022;Joyce et al, 2020;Mohamed et al, 2021;Stampfli et al, 2023); smartphone-deployed apps probing alertness, cognition, and other parameters (Gardesevic et al, 2022;Klein et al, 2021;Shatte & Teague, 2020); ambulatory systems for measuring hormone concentrations continuously (Grant et al, 2022); and novel nonintrusive ways of measuring sleep-wake rhythms over long periods (Alkalih et al, 2022).…”