New smartphone applications and upgrades designed to aid in the treatment of Traumatic Brain Injury and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder are coming in April, providing new options for service members and their families.
“We want our military community to be able to access behavioral health resources quickly and readily,” said Robert Ciulla, a clinical psychologist at The National Center for Telehealth and Technology at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Tacoma, Wash. “So the availability of smartphones now offers a kind of hip-pocket access to resources. It’s kind of an ideal opportunity and solution to get those kinds of resources into the right hands.”
The center, known as T2, made a splash in September with the release of its Mood Tracker application for Android-enabled smartphones, winning first place in the mental health category of the U.S. Army’s 2010 “Apps4Army” software development challenge. Mood Tracker allows users to monitor their feelings from one day to the next, record notes about events associated with their moods and provide accurate information to providers about how treatments are working.
Users monitor along pre-loaded scales measuring anxiety, stress, depression, brain injury, post-traumatic stress or general well-being, and the results are charted over time. The goal is to a gain better understanding of emotions and the events they are linked to or caused by, and provide health care professionals with better data for diagnostic planning and the treatment analysis.
“The beauty of the mood tracker is that individuals can record, in real time, their actual emotions, and actually graph them,” Ciulla said. “The data accuracy is radically better than it would be with a pencil and paper format.”
Since its launch, the software has been downloaded nearly 13,000 times and used for nearly 34,000 sessions. Now, developers at T2 are hoping to raise those numbers by making an upgraded version of the software also available for iPhone and iPad through the popular iTunes store, complete with a new user interface and improved navigation.
“Fundamentally, the application is the same, but I think we have made it easier to use,” Ciulla said.
Also coming in April is a new app called “Breathe2Relax,” a portable stress management tool headed first to iTunes, then to Android. The new app can be used as a stand-alone tool or in tandem with clinical care directed by a health care worker.
Breathing exercises have been documented to decrease the body’s “fight-or-flight” stress response and help with mood stabilization, anger control and anxiety management. The Breathe2Relax app offers a deep-breathing exercise with video-based instruction explaining the body’s reaction to stress and how proper breathing can reduce stress. Narrator-guided exercises, practice sessions and stress ratings tests make for a multimedia environment that the designers hope users will enjoy.
“It’s really an elegant application, with lots of video instruction and animation,” Ciulla said.
The apps are the beginning of a larger software suite the developers at T2 hope to offer in the future. The plan is to create as many as two dozen applications, including more apps for individuals to use on the go, and some targeting health care providers that would provide access to clinical practice guidelines for PTSD, depression and other health issues.
“One of the advantages of these tools, whether they’re Web-based applications or mobile-based applications, is that they can be used privately and confidentially and they can be used whenever a user chooses to access them,” Ciulla said. “We see the technology as having a lot of potential value.”
C. Mark Brinkley, OCIO Communications, contributed to this report.