The need for mental health app rises every year, especially in a society where confinement has become the standard because to Covid-19. To get through their day at home, an increasing number of people have vowed to utilise a stress reliever and meditation app. However, considering the sensitive nature of the topics addressed by mobile applications, developing one is no simple process.
Stress management, exercise, and support are all available through mental health apps. Apps are available to help with a variety of issues, including general and mental health issues. Many people are putting forth a lot of effort to move the focus away from physical health and toward holistic wellbeing. Because mobile customers generate the most traffic and dominate the market, many firms design a mental health app for mental healthcare services.
Going forward in this article, we will take an overview of the need for a mental health app. We will also see how to create a mental health app from scratch. We will wrap up this article with a list of the best mental health apps for your case study.
Market Of Mental Health Apps
Depression, behavioural problems, and mental diseases affect people all around the world. Many people can’t afford traditional therapy, are afraid of the stigma associated with an in-office treatment, or don’t have access to it for a variety of reasons. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, anxiety problems affect 40 million individuals in the United States.
According to the same source, over 75 percent of persons with mental illnesses in poor nations go untreated. This emphasises the importance of having therapy that is both accessible and effective. The coronavirus epidemic has exposed significant flaws in the United States’ mental health care system.
People from all walks of life in the United States are feeling lonely, isolated, and nervous. Take, for example, persons who are employed. According to The Standard, roughly 46% of over 1,400 workers interviewed at the end of 2020 said they were suffering from a mental health condition, up from 39% the year before.
Fifty-five percent of individuals polled said a mental health problem has gotten worse since the epidemic started. Organizations of all sizes are taking steps to address their employees’ mental health issues, ranging from offering counseling through employee assistance programs to offering free online therapy and mental health applications.
Since the start of the coronavirus epidemic, there has been a surge in downloads of applications like Talkspace and BetterHelp, demonstrating people’s need for mental mHealth treatments. They can be a good alternative to traditional treatment because they’re less expensive, accessible to everyone with a smartphone, and provide privacy.
Reasons To Launch A Mental Health App
The most basic reasons to launch a mental health app are listed below:
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Bridges Treatment Gap
You should understand how to make a progressive mental health app because it aids in therapeutic outreach. In other words, even though multiple therapies are accessible, none of them reaches the patient.
The methodology and design of a mental health app should be accurate and rigorous. However, for them to be effective, the advice and treatment must be current and evidence-based.
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Easy To Access
Because of the widespread use of smartphones, mental health app developers and experts may provide mental health therapy in any place. This contributes to societal homogeneity. It is freeing and effective to receive therapy at home for problems such as PTSD, stress, bipolar, anxiety, OCD, Schizophrenia, and Eating Disorders.
It allows you to save time, money, and effort. When it is more productive to use an app on your phone while sitting at home.
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Assist With Treatment
Even if your mental health app isn’t designed to provide full treatment, it might be valuable for data collection and monitoring. Patients are sometimes advised to use such apps by doctors and psychotherapists. Medical staff can then examine the data and conduct the appropriate therapeutic procedures.
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Lack Of Support
Is social media making us less connected or more connected? Less Connected is the answer. Even if someone has 1086 Facebook friends, they may be compelled to call it a day since they have no one to chat to. Isolating problems like this are widening the already enormous chasm. To create a mental health app, you must first understand how to deal with such situations.
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Relieve Work Pressure
Working professionals require mental health applications that tackle stress, anxiety, and promote mindfulness. We’re all stuck in the muck. It might be due to the completion of a project, the acquisition of a customer, or anything else. To get outcomes, we need a clean mind that can think freely. That is why we are concentrating on learning how to create a mental health app that addresses a specific issue.
Different Categories Of Mental Health Apps
When developing a mental health app, the first decision a medical practice must make is what the app should focus on. This selection will have an impact on the app’s logic as a whole, and it will be crucial for the formation of mental solutions and their subsequent success.
Different age groups, genders, and demographics can all benefit from mental health applications. The BlueIce app, for example, is designed with young people in mind, taking into consideration their psychological features. Some mental health applications, on the other hand, cater to people of various ages, genders, and demographics.
These apps are more difficult to make since they demand you to think about a lot more things. Because there is a link between behavioural and physical health, mental health functionality may become part of an app designed to deal with other health concerns. Well doc, for example, has just introduced mental health features to its platform for treating chronic diseases like diabetes and hypertension.
Mental health applications may be divided into three groups, roughly. Mental disease applications are designed to help people with certain mental conditions. Mental self-improvement applications are intended to help mentally healthy people enhance their psychological well-being.
An app for mental health can also be generalists, catering to everyone with mental health issues. There are different categories of mental health apps, and we have listed them in the following section:
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Mental Disorder Apps
For persons suffering from depression, there are thousands of applications available. Some are based on exchanging messages or making phone conversations with doctors, while others include recommendations, self-guided mood training programmes, and gamification components. MoodTools, an anti-depression software, takes depression seriously and has a suicide safety plan in place in the event of a crisis.
There are additional applications for treating diseases like schizophrenia and psychoses, in addition to depression apps. Doctors, on the other hand, argue that apps for individuals with psychological illnesses are best used as a supplement to regular therapy; unlike apps for mentally healthy people, applications for persons with psychological disorders must include doctors.
These in-app experts should be in charge of offering specialised help 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to ensure that users get the most out of their experience. Furthermore, applications for persons with mental illnesses frequently link people with the same ailment, forming communities.
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Mental Self-Improvement Apps
Mental health applications may be developed for those who want to keep track of their mood swings, foster positive thinking, and break unhealthy behaviours. These applications frequently include meditation as a feature. Calm, for example, makes meditation a primary element since many individuals find it useful for managing stress and relaxing.
For individuals who don’t find meditation beneficial, apps like Self-help for Anxiety Management provide various self-monitoring and self-help approaches including physical and mental relaxation.
In-app psychologists are available in certain existing solutions for mentally healthy persons who desire to seek the help of specialists to overcome mental diseases. Apps for psychologically healthy people may be classified into three categories: general mental health apps, addiction recovery applications, and stress-management apps.
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Mental Health Apps For All
Individuals who are mentally well as well as those who suffer from major mental problems can both benefit from a single app. Some mental health applications enable access to a variety of services provided by doctors who provide planned care. Thousands of licenced therapists are available by text, video, and phone call through Talkspace, for example.
Brief Picture Of Mental Health App Development
Now we will discuss how to develop the best mental health apps with ease. You need to follow a set of procedures when it comes to developing an application. We will list down those steps:
1. Choose The Target Audience
Your platform selection will be influenced by whether your app is aimed at elders, adults, or teens. Knowing more about your target patients can help you create more relevant experiences.
2. Decide On Features
When custom designing an app, having a feature list and testing them using a prototype assists you to validate your design ideas and guaranteeing that the result will function as intended. These are the features that you could implement in your app for mental health:
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Self-Monitoring
People with mental problems use stress-management apps to track their symptoms and progress, while mentally healthy people use them to study their mood patterns and manage stress. RR: Eating Disorder Management is well-liked by users since it allows them to keep track of their food, thoughts, and feelings.
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Notifications & Reminders
Notifications provide individualized recommendations, which encourage self-monitoring. Users should relax, take a stroll, and do other things that are healthy for their mental health, according to the reminders.
Notifications encouraging users to conduct mental health activities are beneficial to busy users. However, users are likely to become irritated if they receive too many messages since experts warn that continual notifications are a hazardous cause of stress.
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Sharing
This feature allows users to share directly with third-party healthcare practitioners, family members, and carers or to publish on social networking sites to obtain support from friends. Users like iMoodJournal’s Sharing Moods function, which allows users to share their moods on social media, export data in various formats, and send it via email.
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Support Group
Support groups are available. Many people find that joining a support group can help them overcome their mental health issues. You can gain hope and establish helpful relationships by sharing your story in a safe and confidential context.
Users can participate in talks with those who are dealing with mental illnesses. A mental health practitioner is frequently present to supervise these groups. What’s Up mental health app provides open forums for a user conversation.
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Matching Clients With Therapist
A matching algorithm can identify potential doctors to pick from based on information supplied by a person requesting a consultation. Talkspace provides a welcome therapist who, during a session with a new user, asks a series of questions to match them with the most appropriate doctor.
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Text/Audio/Video Messaging & Chats
Text messages are commonly used to communicate within an app. Users who don’t have the privacy to speak with a therapist out loud would welcome this function. A mental health app can also allow patients to communicate with therapists via audio and video messaging as well as live video and audio sessions, allowing them to pick the most convenient mode of contact.
Making a prototype first not only saves you 10 times the money compared to launching right into production, but it also cuts down on the time it takes to construct your software.
3. Code The Solution For Doctors And Patients
This section will consume most of the development time. We advise adhering to Agile principles and conducting interim tests after each iteration. To ensure timely delivery, follow these guidelines:
- If you’re creating a telemedicine therapy app, use third-party HIPAA-compliant audio/video calling SDKs.
- Use additional off-the-shelf components to speed up delivery, such as a chat.
- Set up a DevOps pipeline to keep developers from doing non-essential work.
- For HIPAA compliance, use cybersecurity best practices.
4. Focus More On UI/UX
UI/UX guidelines for mental healthcare app development stress minimalism and ease of use. Beautiful elements and vibrant colours should be avoided in design since they might cause problems. In addition, pay greater attention to audial impacts to avoid harsh, sudden noises in favour of somewhat relaxing tracks or natural sounds.
5. Choose Monetization Models
How will the creators of mental health apps make money? It’s acknowledged that you’re not in this line of work to help people. Mental health and awareness is, without a doubt, a touchy issue. If you look closely, you could be taking money from a despondent individual who is on the verge of committing suicide. Consider it this way.
“You are assisting your people in living their lives rather than wasting them.” As a result, no monthly price is more precious or significant than life itself. If you have any such concerns, you should address them before learning more about how to create a mental health app.
6. Test Your Mental Health Apps Android Market
As previously said, testing is an essential component of the development process. However, before publishing the solution, this stage describes a significant testing effort. You’d have to think about things like:
- Testing for functionality
- Performance evaluations
- Testing at the unit level
- Extensive stress testing
7. Continue Rolling The Updates
It’s time to welcome people when your programme has been completely tested. The app is out after a round of app store submission procedures (if you’re lucky or working with experts). It’s now time to monitor its performance using the in-app analytics tools you installed during development, respond to user issues and requests, and keep the app updated.
Cost Of Developing Mental Health Application
A feasibility study and cost analysis can assist you to determine whether or not to take the next step. The cost of developing an app is also determined by the features and services included. We can calculate the cost of the mental health business model based on the number of hours required by the mental health app designers and developers.
Best Mental Health Applications For Case Study
These platforms have a small but well-vetted number of mental health applications, which are graded based on their trustworthiness, transparency, and a few other characteristics. We’ll get this list if we cross-reference various app-rating tools and choose the top mental health items that appear in all of them. These are the best mental health tracker apps that you could use for a case study:
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Happify
Happify is a self-improvement app with the stated goal of making its users happy. It seeks to do this using mini-games and meditations while also keeping track of the user’s happiness level.
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Talkspace
Talkspace is a telemedicine platform and marketplace where patients may discover a therapist who is a good fit for them and receive therapy via chat, audio or video consultations.
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Woebot
Woebot is a chatbot that exemplifies how to design an app to assist people coping with anxiety and despair. Woebot not only has discussions, but it also has mood tracking and word games to aid with mental health. It is a decent mental health chat app.
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Daylio
Daylio is a self-care notebook that includes a happiness tracker and mood monitoring. Users keep track of their moods in connection to their activities and then analyse how various factors influence their life. Surprisingly, this anti-depression software has gained a lot of traction among youngsters. It is a good AI mental health app.
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Headspace
Headspace is a meditation app that offers meditations for a variety of purposes and audiences. The software also maintains track of the user’s meditation practice and sends out reminders when it’s time to meditate. It is the best mental health app for students.
Create The Best Mental Health App & Help People
Anyone who intends to develop a mental health app will confront difficulties in comprehending the functionality and design elements required to deliver the greatest value to consumers. Even physicians with years of expertise find it difficult to apply their knowledge and experience to the creation of mental health applications.
The design of an app may alienate users, or in-app processes may not be enough to drive them to take action to recover from a mental illness. Users may also exit an app if they are not provided with the help they require. The list of potential problems is endless. So, make sure to do comprehensive research before starting the development. In this article, we did show you how to develop the best mental health app, and which functionalities to add!
