Mood Diary was the first mobile-phone based mood app. It pre-dated smartphones and was designed to run on Java-based ‘dumbphones’ like the Nokia 3310. Teenagers and children with mental health problems often struggle to engage in therapy. Mood Diary provided a private and convenient way for young people to keep track of their symptoms and feelings using their personal mobile phones. It also provided them and their mental health professionals with graphs to help spot trends or discuss significant events.
‘Mood monitoring’ is an important component of many intervention approaches, including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). This involves people recording their mood at regular intervals, to help them to recognize the factors which may be impacting on their mood and how they have managed at times when they have felt depressed. ‘Mood monitoring’ is traditionally done as a pen and paper exercise, using a mood chart supplied by the therapist. Young people are notoriously poor at completing these charts or remembering to bring them to the next session. In this project a mobile phone version of a paper diary was developed.
Mood Diary was designed with significant input from therapists. Background work involved surveys of therapists existing practice through questionnaires and in-situ interviews and a review of research in the area. The system was evaluated in 3 distinct phrases which allowed the system to evolve before clinical use. The initial phase reviewed 3 designs in working prototype format with peer users. The second phase involved a control trial of MMD against paper-based mood charting, the existing method used in clinics. This again was with peer users in schools. The final phase involved therapists introducing the system with clients suffering from a range of mental health problems.
The resulting app ran on JaveME phones (the app was written in Java), we used a custom SMS gateway for sending messages, transfered data over https and served the dasbhoard using a combinatino of PHP, mySQL and Flash.
Articles
Matthews, M., Doherty, G., Sharry, J., & Fitzpatrick, C. (2008). Mobile phone mood charting for adolescents. British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 36(2), 113-129.
Matthews, M., & Doherty, G. (2011, May). In the mood: engaging teenagers in psychotherapy using mobile phones. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2947-2956).
Doherty, G., Coyle, D., & Matthews, M. (2010). Design and evaluation guidelines for mental health technologies. Interacting with computers, 22(4), 243-252.
