SmartCare by Smartphones – A way towards enhanced patient empowerment: A mixed method study in young adults with schizophrenia

SmartCare by Smartphones – A way towards enhanced patient empowerment: A mixed method study in young adults with schizophrenia

SmartCare by Smartphones was developed in collaboration with the Unit for Psychiatric Research, a group of young patients and their caregivers from the Infirmary for adolescents with schizophrenia in North Jutland.

Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a chronic and severe mental disorder that affects how a person thinks, feels, and behaves. People with schizophrenia may seem like they have lost touch with reality. Although schizophrenia is not as common as other mental disorders, the symptoms can be very disabling and include hallucinations (hearing or seeing things that don’t exist), delusions (unusual beliefs not based on reality), muddled thoughts (based on hallucinations or delusions) and changes in behaviour.

Monsenso’s involvement in SmartCare by Smartphones

The SmartCare by Smartphones project developed a mobile health (mHealth) solution called “MindFrame,”  which is powered by Monsenso, that supports the treatment of individuals with schizophrenia. It consists of a smartphone application for patients and a web portal for clinicians. MindFrame was developed as a framework that offers a unique impression of the correlation between the illness and daily life. Together, healthcare providers and patients can customise the application’s settings so that it corresponds to the person’s actual challenges and supports his particular needs.

MindFrame also provides individuals with customised action plans within the application ensuring that self-help tools are readily available, even when the person is feeling well. Participants are required to fill out a self-assessment on their smartphone; these assessments will reveal the state of the individual’s mental health. The data collected on the self-assessment will be subsequently displayed on the smartphone app as a graph over the course of 14 days.

The clinician can also access the patient’s self-assessments through the clinical web portal enabling him to identify any patterns and make possible connections between certain behaviours and the symptoms they may trigger. With the data from the self-assessments, the system can also identify triggers and early warning signs notifying both, the patient, and the clinician.

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