mHealth in mental health: What do the users think about it?

Abstract

There is currently a major trend for e-health and the first mental health applications for smartphones are now released. Patients and health care professionals are still struggling to position themselves in relation to these new approaches. So, we wanted to know more about the involvement of mental health users and their care providers in mobile health (mHealth) technologies. We needed to understand their expectations and their reluctances. For achieving this purpose, we carried out an online survey for mental health users (n = 108). It turns out that people who responded to this survey are well equipped with smartphones and are experienced in using mobile apps. They expect from professionals an advisory role in relation to e-health. The major interest lies in practical, concrete applications and the main reluctance is about management, transit and storage of data. It is necessary to involve mental health users and health care professionals together in order to develop these new tools. To achieve this, health care professionals must continue to invest themselves in the use and understanding of m-Health tools.

Disclosure of interest

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.