Profile of users of a new E-Mental Health ecological momentary assessment web-based program: MEmind

Abstract

Background

e-Mental Health is an emergent area within e-Health. In the evaluation area, ecological momentary assessment (EMA) has been used to investigate separately on different psychiatric disorders while a comprehensive tool to cover the entire spectrum of mental health has not yet been developed. In this study, we aimed to present the MEmind wellness tracker and to characterize the group of patients who use it.

Methods

We developed an EMA web application: MEmind, accessed through the web page http://www.memind.net. Since 20th May 2014 on, adult outpatients (n = 13,883) attended in all psychiatric services within the Psychiatry Department of Fundación Jimenez Diaz in Madrid were proposed to use MEmind and then registered. Data collected from first year of implementation of the tool were transferred to an SPSS sheet and then analysed. A comparison between patients using and not using MEmind were performed.

Results

MEmind users (n = 2842) were significantly younger than MEmind non-users (n = 11,041) (42.2 ± 13.5 vs. 48.5 ± 16.3; P = 0.000) and mostly women (65% vs. 61.4%; P = 0.001). Also, patients with neurotic disorders were the main users of MEmind (see Table 1). Furthermore, patients with thoughts about death and suicide were more likely to use MEmind (Table 2).

Conclusions

Women, young people and patients with neurotic disorder were the main users of MEmind. Furthermore, people with suicidal thoughts were willing to use MEmind. Novel interventions for suicide prevention could be developed with the use of EMA web-based tools. Further studies are warranted.

Disclosure of interest

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

Table 1

Table 2