JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Mobile application development within mental health is often time-, and resource-consuming, challenging the development of mobile applications for psychiatry and other medical fields. There is a continuum of software development methods ranging from linear (Waterfall model) to continuous adaption (SCRUM). Rapid Application Development (RAD) is a model which so far has not been applied to psychiatric settings and may have some advantages over other models.

Objective:

To use the RAD approach in the development of a mobile application for patients with Border Personality Disorders (BPD) and explore the utility of this model within a psychiatric setting.

Methods:

The four RAD model's phases 1) requirements planning, 2) user design, 3) construction, and 4) cutover, were applied to develop a mobile application within psychiatric outpatient services for patients diagnosed with BPD.

Results:

For the requirements planning phase, a short time frame was selected to minimize the time between product conceptualization and access within a clinical setting. Evidenced based interactive content was reused and provided by current staff to enhance usability and trustworthiness. For the user design phase, activity pages with video themes and a discrete number of functions were used to improve the app functionality and graphical user interface. For the construction phase, close collaboration between clinicians, researchers, and software developers, yielded a fully functional, in-house-developed app ready to be tested in clinical practice. For the cutover phase, the mobile application was tested successfully with 5 patients with BPD diagnosis.

Conclusions:

This study illustrated how the RAD model could be meaningfully applied in psychiatric setting to develop an app for BPD within a relatively short time period from conceptualization to implementation in the clinic. Short time frames and identifying a limited number of stakeholders with relevant skills in-house facilitated the use of this model. Despite some limitations, RAD could be a useful model in the development of apps for clinical populations to enable development and access to evidence-based technology.