Smartphone apps could be next tool in managing mental wellbeing

Interview with Anna Vidot from The World Today

ANNA VIDOT: Tasha Broomhall is the director of Perth mental health consultancy and training organisation Blooming Minds, and she says research out of Dartmouth College in the US that showed a smartphone app can accurately track an individual’s mental wellbeing is a really exciting development.

The research focussed on 48 university students over 10 weeks.

TASHA BROOMHALL: The data that they were collecting was monitoring things like the behaviours of sleeping, physical activity, the number and duration of conversations that the students were having, how they felt about their mental health, their eating habits, their stress levels to measure their current mental health, and academic outcomes; and quite surprisingly has really great results in being able to predict both quite accurately.