Previously submitted to: JMIR Formative Research (no longer under consideration since Jul 07, 2023)
Date Submitted: Aug 10, 2022
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Mobile Apps and Hardware Technology for Mental Health: A Youth Viewpoint on Current Status and Future Directions
ABSTRACT
The field of mHealth, or mobile health, has grown immensely as a result of advancements in technology and, with it, has brought several mobile applications to the market to address mental health needs. Individualized applications and technologies have revolutionized the health industry and have given users the capacity to monitor their mental well-being in many ways. Previously, we had only seen advances in technology that cater to physical healthcare. However, as people have become aware of mental health, we have seen new mHealth apps to help individuals cope with stress, anxiety, and depression. These apps have gained immense popularity among users since they offer at-home interventions such as meditation, breathing exercises, and journaling. Some experts contend that such apps are unsuitable for clinical usage as they are rarely supported by robust scientific evidence. Additionally, the comprehensive evaluation of the effectiveness of these applications has been overlooked. We explore the landscape of mHealth applications, consolidate the evaluation criteria for their assessment, and introduce a new wearable mental health technology: Mentaid. In this review, we find that a distinct set of criteria has been used by existing literature, and we consolidate these criteria into an encompassing mHealth assessment framework for the development of technological advancements for Mental Health.
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© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.