iSchool Capstone

Mood Journal

Project tags:

data science & visualization

information behavior & user research

mobile or web development

Project poster

Mood Journal is a web application that allows mental health patients to log their daily moods and behavior in order to help their therapists to better treat them. This project was inspired by the observation that when patients arrive in mental health clinics, they are given questionnaires to fill out that ask them about moods and behavior in the past two weeks. Considering how fleeting and variable moods can be in such a long span of time, it’s impossible for an individual to accurately answer these questions. Therapists often rely on these questionnaires to both diagnose the patient and to help guide the therapy session. It therefore becomes crucial that the responses are as true to the patient’s state as possible. Mood Journal addresses this issue by prompting users to fill out a 3 question, scaled survey every day, asking about their mood, physical energy level and enjoyment of activities. If their survey score is below a certain threshold then they are asked to fill out a short questionnaire that further inquires about their behavior for that day. Mood Journal displays past logs to patients for them to observe trends in their mood and also allows them to send messages to their therapist if they have concerns. In addition, if a patient is experiencing an extreme low, they are redirected to the necessary resources while the therapist is notified. We hope that with our tool, mental health services will run more smoothly and accurately than ever.

Project participants:

Yu-Min Chung

Informatics

Ian Gahagan

Informatics

Benjamin Lee

Informatics