Authors:
Mohammed Al-Kandari
;
Rakan Al-Halak
;
Rony Hamza
;
Rawan Mostafa
and
Iyad Abu Doush
Affiliation:
Computing Department, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, American University of Kuwait, Salmiyah, Kuwait
Keyword(s):
eHealth, Emotions, Mental Health, Mobile Phone, Usability.
Abstract:
In today’s digital age a lot of people get caught in an overwhelming data flow being delivered through their smartphones and one can quickly forget to see the big picture and how each aspect of his life plays a critical whole in his overall wellbeing. Well-being is the experience of health, happiness, and prosperity. It includes having good mental health, high life satisfaction, and a sense of meaning or purpose. Smartphones can improve the well-being of the individual and people already are using many applications to do so. The problem is that these applications tend to focus on a single aspect of someone’s life or try to do everything at once and end up being a bloated app with a steep learning curve. In this paper, we propose Mental Balance, a goal-oriented wellbeing tool for people with mental illness. It takes a holistic approach in improving the wellbeing of the user by letting him set goals for different aspects of his life and then perform daily self-assessments to record the
ir level of commitment to the goal, their mental state, and a journal summarizing their day. The assessment of the user's well-being is based on a recommended measure called MARS. The application will present personalized recommendations of hand-picked educational materials over time that will target specific aspects of the user's life based on his progress over time. Giving users the ability to look at their well-being from multiple perspectives. The application was evaluated on 3 target users. The results show the effectiveness and efficiency of the developed solution, especially in behavior-changing and information quality.
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