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

Abstract

Wearable applications have a large potential to facilitate healthcare solutions in numerous domains. Smartwatches specifically, by being small, unobtrusive and collecting data continuously, are able to monitor users' activities and detect behavioral patterns. Besides enabling the analysis of users' data, smartwatch application can also provide prompt interventions when necessary. Through timely notifications, discreet alerts and emergency response, wrist-worn devices become versatile solutions that are able to accommodating requirements from several medical solutions. For mental health specifically, smartwatch applications provide numerous affordances. Their characterization is still unclear though. To understand how smartwatch applications have been appropriated as wearable solutions for mental health, we preformed a qualitative analysis of users' reviews and online discussions about existing applications in iTunes and Android Market. Most applications focus on interventions, rather than monitoring. They rely on multimodal contents to provide features. End users see benefits of these apps on the effectiveness of the interventions and customization features. Main drawbacks of existing applications are related to the lack of efficient privacy controls (exploitation by third-parties), early-stage designs (incompatibility and issues with updates) and limited features. In this paper, we discuss current solutions under the light of user experience, features available as well as the potential opportunities for future designs.Background: wearable applications have been extensively explored to address healthcare problems. In mental health, despite numerous mobile applications available, there are few smartwatch solutions in the market. Objective: to understand the current state-of-the-art smartwatch solutions for mental health, characterizing them in terms of features, benefits and drawbacks focusing on the end users' perspectives, to identify opportunities to improve nextgeneration solutions. Methods: a comprehensive analysis of the existing applications for Apple Watch dedicated to mental health care, to characterize their state-of-the-art and provide a unified view of existing solutions, an analysis of their purposes, features, and users' perspectives from online reviews and discussion boards to identify the main benefits and drawbacks with existing solutions Results: the applications analyzed focus mainly on intervention, rather than monitoring and tracking users' affective states; they also focus on wellness and wellbeing and the sources tend to be non-medical; multimodal contents are explored to provide interventions, including audio, images and vibration; users enjoy the customization options and tend to use the applications in a regular basis. Conclusions:there is a vast potential for wrist-worn applications for solutions in mental health, but the domain is still underexplored. Existing applications focus on interventions, and further development and research efforts are needed to advance on monitoring a...