How we’ve built our mental health self-management mobile game! Part 1-mood tracking
We’re building mindora, a mental health self-management mobile game. Mindora consists of eight different mini-games all designed to support different aspects of your mental health from mood tracking, to building cognitive behavioral therapy skills, to measuring changes in your memory and focus. We believe that supporting your mental health can and should be fun.
This is the first of a three part series sharing the inspiration behind each of the mini-games within mindora, how we built them, and where we are taking them in the future! In this part, we share how and why we built our mood tracking mini-games.
Why is mood tracking such an important part of supporting your mental health? For starters, studies have shown that mood tracking itself can improve clinical outcomes for individuals experiencing depression and anxiety [1]. For conditions like ADHD and Bipolar Disorder, mood tracking can be a critical part of understanding shifts in mood and emotional regulation. The biggest barrier to long term mood tracking, however, is engagement since mood tracking is often boring, cumbersome, and tedious [2].
Mood tracking — unlike physical health tracking which relies on devices like fitness watches or rings — is largely self reported by individuals. While a number of new technologies have emerged which infer emotional state automatically through measurements such as heart rate variability or voice, being able to actively identify and express your emotions can be a valuable self-awareness skill when built into a mental health application [3,4]. Unfortunately, most mood trackers on the market either require you to sift through a range of emotions to figure out what you’re feeling (which can be tedious and overwhelming) or they are limited in their emotional expressiveness, requiring you to tap a specific emoji that represents your entire mood for the day. Furthermore, the value created from tracking your mood occurs in the future not in the present. It can be challenging to form a habit when there isn’t an immediate reward to incentivize you to continually engage.
We took all of these considerations and challenges into account when building mood tracking mini-games within mindora. We wanted the experience to be fun for users and an opportunity for them to express themselves and create something by tracking their mood. We didn’t want the only pay off for tracking their mood to be in the future when they become aware of changes or trends in their mood. Lastly, we wanted the experience of mood tracking to enable users to identify multiple emotions while simultaneously reducing the potential to be overwhelmed with too many choices. Not an easy challenge to tackle to be honest!
We’re excited to have mood tracking activities within mindora. For now we have two but we envision a number of future options and iterations based on what we’ve built. Our two mood tracking mini-games are called “Paint Your Mood” and “Mood Swipe.” The inspiration behind these mini-games came from a range of sources: physical bullet journal mood tracking, digital coloring books and swipe mechanics found in many familiar consumer apps.
In Paint Your Mood, you drag different emotions to paint your mood on a canvas. Based on how you’re feeling you “paint” the canvas with the different emotions you’re experiencing. So if you’re having a really happy day but experiencing a tiny bit of anxiety you might paint most of the canvas with the elated emotion with a small section painted with anxiety. For a WIP demo of Paint Your Mood check out our Instagram!
In Mood Swipe you swipe right if you’re experiencing an emotion shown on the screen and swipe left if you’re not. Each emotion is represented by a colored ring which is brighter or fainter based on whether you swipe right or left. By the end of Mood Swipe, you’ve created a multi-colored concentric ring image that depicts your mood for the day. For a WIP demo of Mood Swipe check out our Instagram!
For our early access release, recorded moods are used to generate insights for users and you can also save or share your painted moods or mood swipe rings you create. In the future we plan to utilize the daily moods to create a monthly or yearly image of your mood showcasing a tapestry of your emotions.
Mood tracking is an important component of understanding and supporting your mental health and we are so excited to build it into mindora!
References
[1] Dubad et al. The Clinical Impacts of Mobile Mood-Monitoring in Young People With Mental Health Problems: The MeMO Study. Frontiers in Psychiatry. (2021)
[2] Schueller et al. Understanding People’s Use of and Perspectives on Mood-Tracking Apps: Interview Study. JMIR Ment Health. (2021)
[3] Haque et al. State-of-the-art of Stress Prediction from Heart Rate Variability Using Artificial Intelligence. Cognitive Computation. (2024)
[4] Zhao et al. Vocal Acoustic Features as Potential Biomarkers for Identifying/Diagnosing Depression: A Cross-Sectional Study. (2022)
