How to Create a Mental Health App and Put Psychological Therapist Into Pocket

Nowadays, many people tend to put career and wealth as their №1 priority and pay little attention to their mental health. However, the awareness of the population increases, thus, more people start using mental healthcare services.

Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic forced a new wave of demand for mental healthcare services — up to 36% more people reported having negative impacts on their mental health and well-being in April 2020. The same factor made the mental healthcare industry move towards digitization to start providing services remotely.

However, here comes the question of how to digitize the services.

That can include:

• Achievements & Rewards.
• In-app currency/points that can be later exchanged for goods or merch.
• Coupons.
• A leaderboard.
• Tiers.

While gamification features can significantly improve user engagement (especially in corporate wellness app development), their implementation is best suited for apps not solely targeted at mental disorders, such as meditation or self-improvement apps.

Since the goal of medical mental health apps is to help patients overcome their disorders, it may not be safe for their mental state to be triggered by gamification features.

For example, people with anxiety, depression, suicidal tendencies, OCD, and other disorders, can become frustrated if they aren’t able to get a certain reward, reach a level, collect points, take high places on the leaderboard, etc.

To prevent this, you can either not use such features in the first place or think them out really well, so they don’t become harmful to users.

Workflow Automatization

A significant advantage of app development for healthcare, especially in mental health apps, is the automation of processes, reducing the workload on specialists and cutting costs. In other words, you are able to provide services to more people with the same amount of effort.

To be more specific, you can automate these parts of the workflow:

• Registration of patients.
• Booking of appointments.
• Patients’ interviews before their appointments.
• Processing of payments.
• Daily symptom control.
• Prescription clarification. If a patient forgets about what, when, or how to do, they can simply go on the app and double-check everything they need to.

Security & Regulations Compliance

When working in the mental health field online, such as in women health tracking app development, it’s essential to pay a lot of attention to data security.

There are quite a few features that you can use to enable high-level security.

That implies:

• Multi-factor authentication (password, security token, biometric verification like fingerprints, face ID, voice recognition, one-time passcode, phone call verification, personal security questions).
• End-to-end encryption — a form of encryption where nobody except for the sender and the recipient is able to read the messages sent. For a more detailed explanation, we’d recommend watching this informative video:

• Device fingerprinting. This feature is intended to identify the device of a patient (that includes the operating system, screen size, IP address, location, time, language, etc.). In case certain indicators suddenly change, a user gets a notification.
• Real-time fraud notifications.

Moreover, it’s important to educate users on what they should or shouldn’t do to prevent data leaks. In fact, awareness can be as helpful as the high level of security itself, in some cases.

Another important thing that should be done for security and legal purposes is regulatory compliance. Depending on where you come from or the citizens of what country use your app, you might need to comply with different regulations.

However, the most widely spread ones are GDPR, PIPEDA, and HIPAA compliances:

• GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is a key data & privacy EU law that applies not only to businesses registered in the EU but to ones that work with the EU citizens’ data as well.
• HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996). A federal law of the USA that contains national standards of any health-related data protection. HIPAA compliance is one of the crucial factors for almost any mental health app. What’s great about this law is that it has a pretty definite list of those who need to comply with it.
• PIPEDA is a Canadian data privacy law that defines a relevant security framework for organizations.

Later on, you might need to ask for more detailed information to fully form a medical profile of each patient. As for detailed yet general info, you can ask for a photo and age. Also, nowadays it’s quite important to ask for sex/gender and pronouns. Since the mental health of a modern person highly depends on how they define themselves in society, it’s important that they feel respected and comfortable when using your app.

Surely, you should ask for mental health details — disorders, chronic illnesses, allergies, intolerances, and so on. Depending on the type of your app, you might need to ask some additional questions.

Moreover, you should offer to attach all tests to their profile (like blood or alcohol tests, reports from sessions with specialists, etc.). For this purpose, you might additionally need a file uploading feature.

# 2: Well-Being Check-Ups 📑

To systematically monitor patients' mental health and align with principles such as acceptance commitment therapy (ACT), consider incorporating daily check-ups with general questions into your app designed to develop an app to track mental health.

You can ask about their current mood and any concerns like a psychosomatic form of the issue or pains. Also, you could allow them to add customized questions to such check-ups. Moreover, you can add questions specifically for each disorder or goal, and the relevant symptoms.

Additionally, think about enabling a bar for notes in addition to each question to cover the information that isn’t in the questions themselves. There should be a section for leaving comments at the end of the check-up as well.

So that everything is practically and medically useful, think about allowing to store each check-up to track the dynamics and changes in a patient’s well-being.

# 3: Thought Diary 📘

It’s essential for people with any mental issues to be able to express all of their thoughts. With an app, such a “throw-out” of emotions and concerns can be enabled by adding a diary section.

First of all, it should have a regular typing feature (like in Notes). However, since mental conditions are directly connected to emotions, it’s not always possible for a patient to express what they feel with words (especially, if it’s a kid).

Thus, we’d recommend allowing users to draw, use different colors, geometric figures, and so on. You may even add audio messages for those patients who prefer speaking over writing.

Also, think about giving suggestions on what to write about to spark thoughts and maybe give certain directions as well. Finally, if needed, users should be able to share their notes with a doctor right in the app or via another platform.

# 4: Chat & Video Sessions with Specialists 📷

To get the maximum efficacy of your mental health app and provide a better user experience with it, consider offering video appointments with therapists, psychotherapists, and other mental health specialists.

Apart from the basic functionality that this feature implies, you might need:

• Screen recording, so patients & specialists are able to rewatch their sessions.
• Chats with doctors, so they can contact each other anytime after sessions. Additionally, a chat should be accessible in real time during sessions.
• File sharing (examination results, for example).
• Paintbrush functionality with different colors for mental activities, etc.

# 5: On-Demand Video/Audio Content 📷

It can be a great idea to offer on-demand videos or audios for situations when there’s no need to have an appointment with a specialist or call for urgent mental help, yet, a patient still can’t cope with it on their own.

For example, you can add therapeutic videos/audio recordings for anxiety cases, for instance. Another use case can be if a patient is having a panic attack, people who are currently near them or the patient themselves (if they’re able to) can play a recording with instructions on how to cope.

Such can also include recordings for:

• Grounding.
• Relaxing & stress-release.
• Mitigating symptoms or preventing exacerbation stages (depends on the type of your app).
• Daily positive affirmations to set the mood for the day & others.

# 6: Urgent Mental Help 📛

To be there for your patients when they need urgent help, you can add a set of emergency support features. For example, such may include:

• Access to quick emergency messages or calls (like 112 or 911).
• Calling someone from a pre-saved list of close people — like a spouse, parents, or friends.
• A live chat or call to a support line of your service.

Apart from urgent care, it might be a good idea to offer some general contact information for regular cases like your mental help service phone number, email, physical address (if there is such), links to social media, etc.

# 7: Meditation & Other Mental Activities 🧘

In-app meditations may help patients control their feelings better, understand the true reasons why they appear in the first place, and have a more aware lifestyle. With an app, meditations can be much more customizable and personalized. For example, you can make each meditation accessible in various durations - 3, 5, or 10 minutes.

Another way to provide a better user experience is to tag each meditation correspondingly, let’s say “For Anxiety,” “For Stress,” “For Grounding,” “For Motivation,” etc. This way, users can easily find desired meditation without having to scroll through big meditation lists.

Additionally, it’ll be great if you make recommendations to users based on what they usually watch. This can be enabled with the help of simple analytical AI.

Apart from meditations, there are a bunch of different activities you can add to your app:

• Breathing exercises.
• Stretching & yoga.
• Impersonalization exercises like tree planting & others.

# 8: Forums & Group Chats 💬

With an app, it’s really easy to create an “I am not alone” feeling, which is really important for people struggling mentally. One of the best ways to enable such is by allowing your users to communicate with each other on special forums and in group chats.

For this place to be safe, you can add a Bad Word Filter feature so there will be no bullying, provocative phrases, swear words, etc. To enable it, you can use such APIs as Content Moderator from Microsoft Azure, Perspective, etc.

You can also allow users to be anonymous on these forums since some people may need this kind of support but don’t feel comfortable with others finding out about their personality and condition.

Furthermore, you can implement audio chats like in the Clubhouse app. We talk about that more in our article dedicated to enabling audio chatting functionality in your app if you’d like to learn more about it:

# 9: Push-Notifications 📳

To remind patients about certain activities, daily tasks, journaling, and so on, you can enable push notifications. Moreover, it’s reasonable to send motivational and encouraging notifications to remind people how strong and capable they are.

Self-esteem and being grateful for the progress one is making is highly important for mental health. So, you can help your users realize that with the help of push notifications.

Even though the end goal of such apps is to help people, we shouldn’t forget about the business part. You can use push notifications to offer personalized offers, which can allow you to increase sales.

# 10: Third-Party Integrations 🤖

If you want to measure certain physical indicators like heart rate, daily activities (steps, running) and put that into users’ medical profiles, you can offer them to connect their BLE devices with your app.

To enable such, you’ll need an API like HealthKit from Apple, which includes transferring data from fitness apps and health IoT devices.

At Stormotion, we’ve enabled data transactions from cadence and heart rate sensors right into the Platoon Fit app, a fitness project putting a special emphasis on health monitoring gadgets.

You can offer users to take assessment tests on a regular basis to understand their current mental state. It’s pretty easy to do with a custom app since you won’t be limited in the number of questions and methods of assessment that you can have in your app.

That can be:

• Short video calls with specialists to catch up on patients’ well-being face-to-face.
• Self-assessment features like questionnaires, journaling.
• Tools to get grounded (like meditations, anger management) to better understand the initial feeling.

# 2: Suicide Prevention

Depending on the severity of these conditions, they can provoke suicidal thoughts. With an app, there’s quite a lot that you can do to help people overcome them:

• Distracting tools, audio/video recordings to drag one’s attention from self-destructive thoughts.
• An emergency line for consultancy & ambulance.
• Guidelines for preventive care.
• Tests for suicide tendencies. Such an in-app questionnaire can include previous suicide attempts, family history of suicide, abuse, or other mental disorders, drug/alcohol abuse, experienced traumatic events, and other health conditions.

Sometimes, a person suffering from such thoughts can be unaware of how to behave, which is why it’s highly important to educate friends and relatives on how they can help.

You can add educational guides, hold lectures and webinars on this topic, etc.

Examples of Anxiety, Depression & Mood Control Apps

Let’s take a look at some existing solutions in this field:

• Anxiety Release. Apart from anxiety coping tools, the app helps increase awareness and understand how our brain works with different educational video and audio content.
• Dare. Additionally, the app helps to deal with panic attacks and offers recovery challenges.
• Moodpath: Depression & Anxiety. This app additionally increases its users' awareness & helps them take care of their general well-being.
• Sanvello. The app combines 4 methods of coping - self-care, peer support, coaching, and therapy.
• TalkLife. The app is known for its community where everybody is free to share their experience and get support from other patients.

Addiction Recovery

Apps can be a great addition to clinical treatment or self-control of addictions. Along with the common features for mental health apps, you might want to add some specialized ones to address your target audience better.

# 1: Progress Tracking & Encouraging

Since fighting addictions is a tough process both physically and mentally, it’s essential for people to visualize the progress.

So, you can enable such tracking in several ways:

• Progress bar. You can offer users or their therapists to set goals, for example, “Not to drink alcohol for a month.” And then, a patient can see the bar getting closer and closer to 100% every day.
• Day counter. It might be a good idea to place such a feature on the main screen, so patients can track their progress every day. Additionally, it might serve as a stimulator that will help not to give up halfway through.
• Daily reports. Some people might feel more motivated knowing that at the end of the day, they’ll have to fill out a report on how their recovery process is going.

Surely, you can combine these features for higher efficiency.

Moreover, with an app, it’s easier to encourage and motivate people to keep going. For example, you can send motivational notifications like “You’re doing great!”, “We really appreciate your effort!”, “You have such a strong will, don’t give up!” to support users on their journey.

Alternatively, you can implement gamification elements and features and give users special avatars, tiers, or rewards for reaching a goal — such bonuses can play a significant role in keeping them determined.

# 2: Relapse Prevention Tools

Apps have a lot to offer in terms of relapse prevention for people with addictions.

First of all, you can add a lot of educational materials since awareness can really help in this situation. It’s important for “ex-addicts” to understand that it’s their nervous system, previous behavioral patterns, and hormones trying to trick them into relapse. With an app, it’s easier to deliver this information, which can help them to resist temptation.

To add a more reliable means of control, you can offer to upload clinical tests (like drug or alcohol blood testing) to the app, so specialists can access it as well. When there’s a certain form of accountability, addicts are less likely to experience a relapse, and doctors can react immediately.

Examples of Addiction Recovery Apps

Let’s take a look at some real-world examples of such apps:

• Pear reSET. They have a strong scientific background, authorized by FDA to improve disease outcomes and provide cognitive behavioral therapy, as an adjunct to a contingency management system.
• Sober Grid. This app is considered the world's largest “sober community” with 24/7 live coaching.
• NowWhat. They’re focused on supporting people when they’re recovering from addiction.

Mental Disorders

Digital psychological products can help people with mental disorders like obsessive-compulsive disorder, PTSD, bipolar, schizophrenia, and others. For best practices, mobile apps can work as a tool for symptom mitigation, self-care (to the extent that’s possible in such cases), early detection of exacerbation stages, etc.

Here are some features that will work well for such purposes.

# 1: Journaling

Since patients carry their mobile devices with them most of the time throughout the day, it might be a good idea to add journaling to the app.

Even though journaling might be useful for many types of mental health apps, the ones that target people with such disorders would benefit most from it.

For instance, without an app, it’s pretty hard to track how one’s mental well-being changes during the day and how one feels.

However, a psychiatrist can “prescribe” journaling at least 3 times a day or whenever a person feels like it. If a writing style, general mood of the text changes, or a person manages to precisely explain how they feel, what happened, and so on, a specialist can tell that something is off.

It can help a doctor to determine regularities & connections, see what and how actions or people impact a patient’s mental state and track the dynamics of the issue for treatment improvement.

Additionally, you can include regular mood questionnaires with customized questions for each user.

Examples of Mental Disorders Apps

Since the range of mental disorders is quite wide, we’ve decided to give a couple of apps for the most known disorders:

• OCD: nOCD, Liberate: My OCD Fighter.
• PTSD: PTSD Coach, ACT Coach.
• Bipolar: eMoods Bipolar, Up!.
• Schizophrenia: UCSF Prime, SARDAA Health Storylines.

Most of these apps focus on tracking patients’ mood and mental wellbeing in as much detail as possible. Thus, they work as a rather supportive method to the main medical treatment.

Eating Disorder

Treating eating disorders is really specific since it directly affects physical health yet needs to be treated as a mental condition as well.

So, let’s review what features can be added to such eating disorder apps.

# 1: Calorie Tracking & Recipes

For healthy and balanced eating habits, it’s important to track calories, so a patient doesn’t eat too quickly, overeat or eat too little.

You can automate this process as much as possible by using an API like CalorieKing so users can choose ingredients (dishes, separate products, etc.), specify the weight of whatever they’re eating, and the tracker will automatically count calories and split up the dish into nutrients.

Additionally, it might be a great idea to offer various lists with recipes. You can include such for different categories of patients: without special demands regarding the ingredients, with diabetes, different allergies, lactose intolerance, low & high calories, and many others.

In fact, we have an article dedicated just to Nutrition & Diet apps if you’d like to check it out:

# 2: Meal Planner

Another essential feature for eating disorder apps is meal planner.

The functionality of such an app should include:

• Customizable meals.
• Menus with detailed description of each dish.
• Recipe planning.
• Notes and daily reminders.
• Calendar & others.

It might be a good idea to allow doctors to access this planner to control the process & maybe even manage it, change calories, add dishes, etc.

Examples of Eating Disorder Apps

Here are some real-life examples of such apps:

• Recovery Record. The app has great personalization features.
• Rise Up. The app has a lot of educational content and pays a lot of attention to users’ emotions.
• Brigher Bite. All methods of coping are scientifically based, which is a great indicator of quality and efficiency.
• Plan to Eat. This app follows its users on each step of their recovery — from groceries to a multi-platform meal calendar that can be integrated with other calendar software.

Self-Development

The self-improvement app market is really diverse — there are apps for increasing patience, concentration, attention problems, building self-confidence, overcoming fears, and many others.

Let’s take a look at how exactly such an app can help you provide better services for your target audience.

# 1: Coaching Sessions

Since it might be hard for some people to improve their personalities by themselves, it might be a good idea to offer coaching sessions with mentors and therapists.

That can include:

• Live coaching sessions.
• Pre-recorded courses with step-by-step video guides.
• Learning material & useful links (articles, YouTube Channels, etc.).
• Goal setting.

We have a whole article dedicated to coaching app development, so you can check it out if you’re interested.

# 2: Habits Tracker

For people to have a more systematic approach to using self-development apps, it might be a good idea to add a habits tracker into your app.

You can offer pre-made goals after asking individuals to fill out questionnaires regarding their goals to set them with a coach or therapist after the session, and to fully customize their daily/weekly/monthly to-do lists.

Many habits tracking apps have a calendar for better progress visualization. You can mark different results with a different color, for example:

• 0-25% of the goal — red.
• 26-50% — orange.
• 51-75% — yellow.
• 76-100% — green.

# 3: Workouts

Personal growth apps often include workouts & exercise plans since many people have that as their goals.

You can include workouts:

• For different groups of muscles.
• Of different lengths.
• For people with different health issues (like back/knee pain, problems with the spine, etc.).
• Of various intensity & others.

Examples of Self-Development Apps

There are quite a lot of such apps on the market:

• Remente.
• Happify.
• Coach.me.
• Ascend.

Meditation & Mindfulness

As many people become more aware of their “inner self”, more and more of them try to meditate to reduce stress, get grounded, understand their feelings better, and just spend a couple of minutes in silence.

We’re not going to get into detail here, since we have a whole article dedicated to developing such apps:

Examples of Meditation & Mindfulness Apps

Let’s take some of the existing solutions as an example:

• Calm. The app offers a wide variety of content — apart from meditations, there are breathing exercises, sleep stories, music, as well as remixes of famous artists and songs for sleep improvement, focus, and so on.
• Headspace. This app pays a lot of attention to educating users and does it with help of video content & celebrities.
• Insight Timer. They have a great deal of free content — more than 90,000 types of meditations are accessible at no cost.
• Buddhify. What’s special about this app is that they’ve adapted it to a modern busy lifestyle and have meditations that can be done on the go or while doing something else.

We’ve covered a case study on our blog, dedicated to the first 3 apps on the list if you’d like to get some tips on how to improve your current or future meditation & mindfulness product:

Our mental health app development company made an app with a new concept, compared it to their previous solutions, and modified the content distribution system for the Feel Amazing project. Previously, users were getting their courses via email with a Dropbox link. Now, all courses are accessible and purchasable in the app itself.

If you’d like to find out more about this specific project, please follow the link to this case study on our website:

That can include:

• Name.
• Photo.
• Specialization.
• Contact details.
• Rating & reviews.
• Price (per hour, for example).
• Available hours for appointments & others.

# 2: Patient Profile

To be able to fully manage a patient’s treatment process, doctors will most likely need an extended patient profile with their medical history, current diagnosis, prescriptions, test results, and so on.

We’d recommend making 3 lists of patients:

• New ones (haven’t had their first appointment yet, for example).
• Current ones.
• “Closed” ones (stopped working with them as of now).

It’s a good idea to make these lists customizable, so each specialist can manage them according to their cases/preferences. You might as well consider allowing them to create an unlimited number of patient lists.

# 3: Schedule

For doctors to manage their workload and timetable conveniently, you can add a scheduling tool into your app.

One of the most widespread ways to enable this feature is by integrating a functional calendar with features to manage appointments, leave notes, and so on.

Additionally, you can integrate this feature with 3rd-Party Platforms that are already a part of your processes. For example, you may automatically transfer data of new users to a CRM you use or link a video call in Google Meets or Zoom.

We have an article dedicated to online booking tool development, where we explain all the development aspects in detail:

# 4: Chat

Technically, the feature is the same as it is for patients, however, doctors might need a more extended and structured version of it since they’ll have many chats active simultaneously.

As with patient profiles, chats can be separated into several screens — new, current, not active.

It’s reasonable to allow patients & doctors to share files like lab results, documents, photos, etc. with each other within the app. For a more convenient user experience, you can integrate the chat with users’ cameras so they can make photos/videos directly in the app.

Furthermore, many healthcare apps use a chatbot that asks users about their symptoms and concerns so doctors can dedicate more time to understanding the problem deeper.

Additionally, you might add a bar for notes, so doctors can mark important information during calls. Then, these notes can be transferred to patients’ profiles (on the doctor’s version of the app).

# 5: Analytics

It’s also important to provide specialists with different accurate metrics to manage, track, and optimize various aspects of their services.

It can include:

• The daily/weekly/monthly number of patients.
• The total number of patients.
• New patients (requests).
• The total revenue (or the total over a certain period of time).
• The revenue from each individual therapy.
• Satisfaction rate & others.

Application Development Process

Once the MVP version is ready and fully compliant with all your requirements, move into full-scale depression app development. Pay special attention to writing code that adheres to security standards and usability. Focus on:

• Compliance with HIPAA rules for patient data protection.
• Integration of third-party SDKs for medical audio and video calls for telemedicine capabilities.
• Utilization of ready-to-use libraries for functions like bio authentication, scheduling, and chat.

Testing

Thoroughly test the application before launch to ensure its functionality and performance on various devices. This includes:

• Module testing to check individual components.
• Performance testing to ensure stability and scalability.
• Functional testing to verify the application meets requirements.
• Stress testing to evaluate application performance in extreme conditions.

Marketing Strategy

Advertise your app. Utilize social media advertising, external promotions (such as advertising banners), and explore the option of placing advertisements in locations frequented by your target audience. Concentrate on increasing brand recognition and informing potential users about the benefits and advanced features of the application.

Application Launch

After testing and marketing, release your application on suitable platforms including iOS and Android. If the application is hybrid-compatible, release it on both platforms simultaneously.

Updates and Maintenance

Launching the application is not the end. After the launch, monitor application performance, user engagement, and feedback. Regularly update and improve the application's functionality in order to retain existing customers and attract new ones.

💡 Takeaways

Although mental health apps can significantly ease the process of treatment and make it more convenient, such conditions require a comprehensive medical approach.

That's why we recommend using the app rather as a complementary part of the whole treatment that helps to keep in touch with patients, have regular updates on their mental state, reduce the workload by automating certain parts of the workflow, etc.

Don’t forget about the security of your app. For mental health apps, it’s not only important to actually provide security, but also to let users know that they’re safe.

If you need any help with mental health app development or have any questions left, feel free to reach out to us. We’d be happy to help you on your journey to improving people’s mental state!