Using mobile technology to steer moods to the bright side

By Alvin Lee

SMU Office of Research & Tech Transfer – According to a 2018 World Health Organization report on suicide, some 800,000 people die at their own hands each year – one every 40 seconds. While suicide rates have traditionally been highest among elderly males, those below 30 are now the highest at-risk group in a third of all countries. Globally, suicide is the second leading cause of death for the 15-29 age group.

Suicide broadcasts on social media by teenagers and even pre-teens reflect the trend. But it also presents opportunities for preventive intervention, pointed out Kyong Jin Shim, Assistant Professor of Information Systems at the School of Information Systems (SIS).

“Since most youths, including university students, are active users of digital tools such as smartphones and mobile applications,” Prof Shim told the Office of Research and Tech Transfer, “my research group took on a project of developing a mobile application to help university students track their mood via gratitude and rant journaling.”

The project

Together with a School of Social Sciences (SOSS) undergraduate student Gladys Ng (who graduated in 2019) as well as two SIS undergraduate students Martius Lim (who graduated in 2019) and Eugene Choy (current final year student), the goal was to create “mental health tools we can use without fearing social censure”.

“Unlike in popular social media platforms where the user can make certain posts or photos visible to friends or the public, our mobile application limits each user’s data to the user himself or herself only,” explained Prof Shim. “Because our application provides a highly private environment, we believe that users feel more encouraged to open up and pour out their feelings without the fear of being judged.”

Users, Lim elaborated, can use the app to express either gratitude (positive emotions) or to rant (negative emotions) in order to “release steam”. The app then analyses the content for both positive (“I feel great”) and negative (“Please kill me!”) emotions, and graphically presents a user’s mood changes over time. If a user’s mood is on a downward trend, the app would detect that and remind the user of things that he or she likes, such as specific hobbies or activities.

“We leave it to the user to decide whether he or she wants to receive help – when our analysis indicates that he or she may be at risk,” explained Choy. “If our analysis shows that the user may be at risk, our application immediately prompts the ‘Help’ screen. The user has a choice of registering one or more friends in the app’s ‘Call My Friend for Help’ registry. We also provide the 1-800 number of Samaritans of Singapore, a 24-hour hotline.”

Gratitude journaling, not surprisingly, works better than rant journaling. Lim pointed out that prior studies have shown that gratitude “improves mental well-being and reduce suicidal ideation”, which explains the app’s prompting “users to think positively and actively write out what they are thankful for each and every day”.

Surveying the mood

In the course of developing the app, Ng ran surveys to determine how various demographic factors, ranging from age to religion, affect a person’s satisfaction with regard to different life situations. By running IBM SPSS Statistics, the survey found that having a religion positively predicts family satisfaction.

Additionally, age positively predicts religious and relationship satisfaction.

“There's a significant finding that with every increase in age by a year, the survey respondent is 6.4 percent more satisfied with his/her religion and faith,” Ng elaborated while pointing out that age explains only nine percent of the reason why a person may be satisfied or unsatisfied with one’s religion.

Similarly, relationship satisfaction goes up by 1.9 percent with every increase of a year in the age of a survey respondent, with age explaining 7.5 percent of that feeling of satisfaction/dissatisfaction.

“The chances are,” Ng explained, “the younger the users, the more likely they will feel dissatisfied in these areas of their lives and this kind of frustration may ultimately lead to mental health issues such as stress and depression which we are trying to avoid.” The upshot of all that is that mental health tools should be customisable to pay extra attention to:

• younger users and tracking their religion or relationship satisfaction;
• users without religions and tracking if there are any pressing family issues.

Ng also ran a second survey to see if females were more receptive than males towards cathartic activities such as venting to friends, crying, writing, painting, etc. when dealing with stress. The results found that females were “significantly more receptive than males towards cathartic activity” while males wanted visualisation in the app to help cope with stress.

“For survey 2,” Ng noted, “it just means that, if we were to develop an application and customise and personalise it, it is good to note that the survey results strongly indicate that the male users will most probably find visualisations to be useful in the app, while the females may not care too much about them.

“These results are based on a small pool of survey responses. We plan on conducting a wider scale survey as well as focus group sessions to better understand what kinds of visualisation will attract more users and usage.”

Future app version

Bearing in mind the target audience of young people, Prof Shim shared that focus group sessions seeking feedback to improve usability produced some interesting results. She elaborated:

“Some participants voiced that millennials are less likely to want to ‘write’ in essay style. Rather, they would prefer to indicate their feelings using more graphics. In a future version of the mobile application, instead of typing a sentence ‘I had a very bad day’, users will be presented with a series of images or videos. If a particular image or video describes their day, users simply have to press or tap the image.

“Recent studies have shown that playing action video games can improve cognition and prevent stress and depression. We want to enhance the way ‘ranting’ is done today in our mobile application. We plan to add game-like features in the Rant Wall. After typing out or indicating negative emotions, our mobile application will prompt the user to ‘shake off’ negative feelings by physically shaking their mobile phone.”

Back to Research@SMU Aug 2019 Issue