How Technology is Transforming Mental Health Care in 2020?

Mental health

19.1% of U.S. adults have experienced mental illness in 2018 alone. If you look at the population, you will know that at least 1 in 5 adults is going through mental illness. These are just instances that have been reported. There are many people, who are yet to talk, despite the growing awareness and the open culture regarding mental illness.

A good amount of people have understood the importance of talking about it, and are ready to embrace the fact that they are going through anxiety, depression, and other mental health-related issues. Today, the world is becoming more aware.

What is mental illness or, why should it be discussed?

There are millions of mental illness and substance abuse challenges that people are facing. A few of them include depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and addiction.

These disorders tend to impact your emotions, as well as your behavior and thinking abilities. It can cause a literal dysfunction in your personal functioning as well, which can lead to attitude and other personality changes. Even at the happiest hour, you may not be as happy as you wish to be. In fact, some days you might just not want to break free from the emotional challenges you are facing.

Caregiving has become an essential part of handling mental disorders. Along with family, proper counseling and caregiving will help channelize the energies that cause mental illness towards curing it. It is a daily battle, one that needs to be fought from within, and the counselors help achieve it.

Technology is slowly ensuring a proper channel for caregivers to connect with the people facing mental illness issues.

Here we will talk about all the ways in which technology is transforming mental health care.

#1 Digital Care

Today, we have mobile apps that bring resolution to an array of medical issues. You can easily scan your reports and show it to the caregivers, and ask them to resolve it, without stepping out of your house. The same can be extended to mental health. With mobile apps, the patient can connect with the counselor and safely communicate their issues. The mobile apps developed for this purpose will need to keep the safety and security of the messages and data shared, which means they will need to incorporate technologies that promise security.

With VR and AR technologies, the patients can identify their caregivers in the immersive state. This means, in case they are reluctant to move towards patient-caregiver communication in the real world, they can do so in the app world. It will not only get them the desired help but also ensure that there is instant and real-time communication, thus increasing the safety and security of the patients.

#2 Identifying the Mental Health State

The condition of your mental health keeps changing, and you ought to keep up the treatment plan in order to ensure you are getting the treatment for the actual state. This is difficult in case you are not aware of the condition at this point. Wearables and sensors have been designed to identify the actual condition. This will be relayed to the mobile apps, which will communicate the status to the caregivers. Eventually, the caregivers can transform the treatment plan, and even change the dosage of the medicines, if needed, in accordance with the need.

With wearables, the caregivers will not only get real-time information about the mental health condition but also get access to data that is accurate and precise. In fact, the quality of raw data will be good enough for the caregivers to identify just what is happening with the patient.

Apart from the patient’s mental health status, the wearables can also connect the sleep and activity levels to understand how you have fared thus far with the treatment offered to you. it can also help understand the symptoms that occur during early development stages so that care can be given at the early stages itself.

#3 Insight Building

It is important for healthcare professionals to understand the symptoms and diagnose the condition. Raw data plays an important role in this process. It is the data that is analyzed, and visual reports that are generated that help the caregivers understand what is happening, and how to deal with the condition at hand. Mobile apps can help with data collection and analysis. In fact, there will be many conditions for which insights will be devised by the mobile app, which can provide the actual status and help to the caregivers. This will also help the caregivers devise a good action plan for the people suffering from mental illness

#4 Artificial Intelligence for Automation

A certain level of automation is required in consultation, counseling and even understanding the condition. Apart from this, you also need to know how long the condition will persist and what will be the future. These things can be dealt with properly if you have incorporated AI into your mobile apps.

The chatbots can act as intelligent counselors and can conduct the preliminary sessions. In the near future, you can even have robots functioning as caregivers, which will enhance the method of counseling, and improve the overall functioning of the caregiving process.

Therapeutic tools can go advanced if you incorporate the right techniques in the near future.

#5 Feedback is Important

With AR in your mobile apps, you can call for real-time feedback into your condition, and get your caregivers to help you with the right kind of treatment. In case there is a change in the condition, AR will help analyze the change, and even communicate the same to the caregivers, thus changing the medication.

You will be able to manage the non-clinical environments as a result of AR operated mobile apps.

Summing Up

Mental health apps will not only help improve caregiving, but will also make it instantly available, and convenient to the patients and caregivers. You will see a multitude of technologies collaborating to make the advances in caregiving.

It is important to understand the needs of the patient going through mental health issues and process these conditions and the care in your mobile app. Only when your app helps the real-life conditions will it be used and approved by more patients.

The future of healthcare is digital, and the future of mental healthcare is convenience, and safety. 

Author Bio

Pradeep Makhija is a Digital Marketing Executive at Space-O Technologies, a mobile app development company. He likes to share his knowledge and experience with people around by writing articles related to the mobile app and the healthcare industry. In his spare time, Pradeep likes to explore and read more about the trends and needs of mobile apps in different sectors.