Anyone who’s ever dealt with depression, anxiety, bipolar, etc, may understand the tedious experience of tracking your mood: useful, but fuuuck does it get old very, very quickly.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* a solution may be at hand *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Over at Disrupt SF Hackathon, the quarterly Silicon Valley pissing contest, a mood tracking prototype called Hack My Mood was presented by Allison Nelson.
Hack My Mood uses cognitive computing software (IMB’s AlchemyAPI) to analyse social media posts, and then cross-references it with weather information.
We’re not across all the nitty gritty at this point – it was presented mere days ago as a prototype – but it looks like the software is as sophisticated as it adaptable. By analysing Nelson’s Twitter account, Hack My Mood showed that although she was excited about starting her new job, she was also stressed, and that when the temperature dropped, so did her mood.
It also takes into account times when you don’t tweet, which may be an indicator of a low mood.
Dr Bridianne O’Dea, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Black Dog Institute, looking into associations between mood and online behaviour / conversations, is absolutely in favour of Hack My Mood, although would like to see more research undertaken before it went live.
“We still need to determine the accuracy of this data before any strong conclusions on usefulness can be made,” she told P.TV.
“Hack My Mood is an example of the exciting innovations in the area of mobile health. Consumers are now demanding more engaging and less intrusive measures of mental health, and apps like these have the potential to deliver this.
“Worldwide, there is a general reluctance to seek help for mental health problems. Mobile technology allows us to collect a wide array of physical and emotional measures in real time.
“This has the potential to significantly improve self-awareness of one’s mental and physical state, and may promote help-seeking in ways previously not possible.”
Hack My Mood is in no way available to the public yet, unless you want and have the capacity to recreate Nelson’s idea, but could someone fund this please?
If you think you may be experiencing a mental illness or mood disorder, get in contact with Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636. If you are feeling suicidal, call Lifeline now on 13 11 14.
Picture Credit: Pixar.
via TechCrunch.
