Researchers at Cornell have been awarded the prestigious $100,000 Heritage Open mHealth Challenge for their smartphone app designed to assist people whose mental health has been affected by bipolar disorder. Known as “MoodRhythm”, the app has been developed for iPhone and Android phones by a team led by Tanzeem Choudhury, associate professor of computing and information science, and postdoctoral fellow Mark Matthews. But what makes it so worthy of such an illustrious prize?
When your wellness is affected by bipolar disorder or manic depression, your mood can swing from extreme happiness and hyperactivity to complete depression. This takes its toll on your emotional well-being, and is associated with poor functional and clinical outcomes, high suicide rates and huge societal costs. This is where MoodRhythm comes in; giving you advice on how you can maintain a regular daily rhythm, and helping your doctor to monitor your progress, based on your personalised information.
The app uses the microphone, light sensors and accelerometer in your phone to monitor your sleep and social patterns, and also gives you the option of reporting your daily activities, food routines and mood. The combination of all this information enables your phone to determine the situations which have positive or negative outcomes. Although the phone listens to your conversations, you don’t need to worry about your privacy as it does not listen in on the content of speech. Rather, the technology notes variations in pitch, volume, speaking rate and other characteristics which indicate different emotional states.
Traditionally, patients have used paper diaries which are difficult to maintain, and so Choudhury collaborated with patients and clinicians to develop a more usable app. According to Choudhury, ‘It is one of the greatest challenges in health care to develop cutting-edge technology that not only meets clinical needs but that can be incorporated with ease into patients’ lives.’ So why choose rhythms? ‘Rhythms guide our lives,’ Choudhury explains. ‘Our biological clocks tell us when we need to sleep, eat and wake. When these rhythms are interrupted or obstructed, it can be difficult for our bodies to get what they need to stay healthy and balanced.’