Can Wearables Improve the Mental Health Problem in our Country?
Say you have around 5 close friends. How many of them do you think are suffering from anxiety? Data from the National Alliance on Mental Illness would say at least one of them is.
18% of American adults live with anxiety disorders and 7% of American adults live with major depression. Millennials are even more prone to depression–with 19% reporting that they have depression. Serious mental illness costs America $193.2 billion in lost earning every year. You would think that with such a large percentage of the country’s population being affected, adequate care should be given to them. But over 60% of adults with a mental disorder do not receive mental health services.
Obviously there is the social stigma of having a mental illness that keeps people from getting help, but also the cost and inconvenience of going to see a doctor deters them as well.
Normally, when you think of wearables and the mobile applications they’re associated with, you think about people using them to gain insight and knowledge about their activity throughout the day. For the average, healthy user, it may be interesting to know your heart rate, your sleep patterns, and how much exercise you’re getting. But for a mental health patient, this data has a lot of potential.
Data like heart rate, breathing rate, and sleeping patterns can be collected from most wearable technologies, and psychiatrists can utilize this data to track the effectiveness of medications and and treatment. With further integration, patients could track their emotions and log their activities throughout the day and doctors can track individual progress much more closely. Doctors could communicate with patients if they notice a trend of increased heart and breathing rate during certain times or activities and could help come up with a solution at the next therapy session.
Wearables like the Fitbit Charge 2 now come with a guided breathing experience called “Relax” that notices when your heart rate is up and vibrates at a constant rate that you try to match your breathing to. Spire and Prana are similar wearables that are made specifically for tracking breathing patterns. They can notify you when your breathing rate is high, or give you data about when you’re most likely to be stressed during the day.
For people who are living busy lifestyles but also suffering from mental health issues, wearables and mobile applications have the potential to improve efficiency in mental health treatment by reducing the inconvenience of frequent therapist visits. Additionally, this can reduce the psychiatrist workload as well, since the patient will not have to take up time telling the psychiatrist about their stress levels and activities during the week. The psychiatrist will get to see live data from the patient and prepare for the therapy session accordingly. The conversations during therapy will thus be more focused on improvement and how to lower stress levels in everyday situations.
Through improved integration of wearable technology data, more doctors can utilize a blended therapy, in which patients can send data and communicate with their therapists online, while also having face-to-face therapy visits as well.
With Sherbit, we can increase the modes of communication between patient and doctor, making therapy more efficient and and convenient. Sherbit’s mission is to provide a new way for doctors to understand patient’s lives and enhance care through personalized insights and recommendations. We provide insight into patient activities and behaviors between clinical visits, pulling data from over 25 apps and devices to provide analysis and send alerts to care teams. Sherbit is the perfect solution for providing the round-the-clock care that patients deserve, and for making psychiatrists’ jobs much easier.
