The mobile health challenge chose the MoodRhythm application as its top prize winner.
A mobile health app designed to assist people who have bipolar disorder to gain a more thorough understanding of their personal rhythms has now won the Heritage Open mHealth Challenge, which comes with a prize of $100,000.
The challenge was created to help to enhance the multichannel approach to health and care.
It was co-sponsored by Heritage Provider Network, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Open mHealth. The challenge was designed to help to spawn an interest and an action in the development of mobile health applications that will use an open architecture in order to communicate among one another as well as to be able to function on different types of devices.
The creators of the winning mhealth app are a team under the leadership of Tanzeem Chadhury.
Chadhury is an associate professor of computing and information science. He was joined by Mark Matthews in this effort. Matthews is a postdoctoral fellow.
The MoodRhythms app uses the microphone, accelerometer, and light sensors of a smartphone in order to monitor social and sleep patterns. This data is then combined in order to create a report for the bipolar patient regarding his or her daily activities, mood, and food routines, in order to help to identify the positive and negative outcomes of these various areas of his or her life.
The mhelath app also provides the patient with useful advice in order to maintain a steady daily rhythm, while building a considerable amount of helpful information for the doctor of the patient. The team behind the app is contributing a module for sleep, routine, an sensing to Open mHealth.
According to Choudhury, “Rhythms guide our lives.” The co-creator of the app also went on to say that “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.”
The condition addressed by this mhealth app is one that impacts an estimated 5.7 million American adults and causes those individuals to experience extreme mood swings from happy to extreme depression, hyperactivity to lethargy. There is a high suicide rate among people with bipolar disorder.
