Health-e Minds: a Participatory Personalised and Gamified mHealth Platform to Support Healthy Living Behaviours for People with Mental Illness

This paper presents the development of an innovative platform (Health-e Minds) to support persons with diagnosed serious mental illness (SMI) in their self-management, but also to enhance multidisciplinary care provision. It comprises of a smartphone app and an interactive internet-based clinician web portal. The smartphone app accompanies and guides persons with SMI through their recovery journey by monitoring health measures, delivering simple interactive questionnaires and providing educational and motivational multimedia content. The web-portal enables clinical care providers to view their client’s progress and provide individualized feedback and/or early care intervention dependent on the advice of the clinical review. A unique feature of the platform is an inbuilt gaming component which encourages patients to adhere to the goals set in consultation with their clinicians. Rewards are attained by comparison of activities achieved, measured against individualized goals, set through the clinical portal. A feasibility study is underway among 40 patients with SMI at the Sunshine Coast University Hospital, in order to ascertain levels of program efficacy and successful health-related outcomes.