At September 10 this year more than 30 people in gathered at H2 Health Hub to participate in Health Hack Academy 2016. In seven team they created new tools to improve the mental health of young people. Now the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions has decided to support one of the teams to further explore their concept.
The third edition of Health Hack Academy took place on September 10th this year. More than 30 people gathered at H2 Health Hub to create new tools to improve the mental health of young people. Now the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (Sveriges kommuner och landsting, SKL) has decided to support one of the teams to further explore their concept. SKL were part of the Health Hack Academy planning and execution with representatives from "Uppdrag psykisk hälsa". This is a group at SKL that has a government mission to work on long-term strategies and actions related to mental health among children, adolescents and adults in Sweden.
Rickard Bracken at SKL highlights the importance of early and qualitative help to young people, which are beginning to develop mental problems. Therefore SKL is collaborating with a large number of actors that are close to young people such as student health teams, adolescent health centres and primary care centers. Also the preventive measures are an area that needs actions. This year Health Hack Academy focused on using new technology and new methods, to raise awareness of mental health in schools, and to give young people tools to easily share their experiences and get qualified and relevant help.
- Participation in Health Hack Academy has given us the opportunity to take part of ideas that emerge from the interaction between experts within health care, people with experience of mental problems and the young tech developers and innovators, says Rickard.
Moodstory
SKL chose to support a team with an idea they called Moodstory. Moodstory is a smartphone app that aims to recognize patterns in moods and mental wellbeing by tracking experiences and emotions during the day. A simple user interface let you take pictures of situations that trigger a specific emotional reaction. You tag the picture with the feeling and the location of the picture is automatically registrated. The tool will help the user and, if relevant, the treating psychologist to better understand situations and behaviours that influence the mental status.
- We selected Moodstory because we think it has the potential to help young people expressing their emotions and track experiences in order to support the dialogue between the young patient and caregiver and to recognize patterns and choose appropriate actions, Rickard continues.
The team behind Moodstory is Christabella Irwanto, Katri Frankenstein, Niklas Zilliacus, Sara Tengvall and Dora Palfi, all with different skills and backgrounds reaching from psychologist to interaction designer, tech developers and entrepreneurs. The team members hadn't met before the hackathon but all were keen to create something great during the day.
- We soon realized that there was a reason for why each and every one of us was on the team: we each had our strengths in different, complementing areas. Some of the challenges at the beginning of the day stemmed from the fact that we did not know each other - we were careful with our ideas and with our criticism. However, thankfully to the moderated brainstorming process we could move past there issues, says Dora Palfi, one of the team members who is a master student at Royal Institute of Technology, majoring in Human Computer Interaction.
Niklas Zilliacus is founder of the start-up YourMind, which is a web- and mobile booking platform raising awareness about mental health and easing access to psychotherapy. Both Dora and Niklas attended Health Hack Academy to meet other likeminded people and to work with something that they are passionate about.
Integration to existing messaging platforms
The tech-concerned team members also pointed out the importance to integrate Moodstory with apps that people already uses and they would like to explore integrations with e.g. Facebook Messenger.
- I believe Moodstory coud be a great mobile application for people to easily express their emotions through words, pictures or songs etc. when actually having that feeling. You don't need to have another app due to its integration to an existing messaging platform and I think this could benefit most people in their everyday life, says Niklas.
The next step for the Moodstory and SKL collaboration is a workshop with representatives from organizations that work with children and young people's mental health in order to further develop and test possible solutions. A dialogue with people from the main target group to get their comments and suggestions will also be initiated. If successful, the intention is develop a prototype for testing and evaluation. Stockholm Science City Foundation will keep you updated on the process.
If you have any ideas on that challenges Health Hack Academy should focus on next year, please contact andreas.namslauer@ssci.se.
