A self monitoring app for eating disorder therapy that lets patients track their behavior, thoughts, goals, and the meals consumed, as well as get their Health Professional’s feedback and support to make treatment instant and seamless.
Short overview
Andrii Muzh
Oleg Kondratiuk
Oksana Bachun
Serhii Sushko
Time:
November 2021 - ongoing
Platform:
Mobile application
Industry:
Mental Health Care
Country:
Australia
Services:
Mobile App Development, Dedicated Team
Short overview
Team:
![Andrii Muzh]()
Andrii Muzh![Oleg Kondratiuk]()
Oleg Kondratiuk![Oksana Bachun]()
Oksana Bachun![Serhii Sushko]()
Serhii SushkoTime:
November 2021 - ongoing
Platform:
Mobile application
Industry:
Mental Health Care
Country:
Australia
Services:
Mobile App Development, Dedicated Team
About the client
InsideOut is an Australia’s national research institute for eating disorders, with a strong focus on implementing their research discoveries into everyday practice to achieve the most efficient prevention and treatment. Their goal is to provide access to high-quality evidence-based treatment for every Australian experiencing eating disorders.
Project idea
As eating disorders are often treated with a combination of clinical therapy and self monitoring, the InsideOut team decided to develop a self monitoring app to remove the need for paper tracking. It would be an instrument to let the client keep track of their food, thoughts, and behaviours during their eating disorder journey. Push notifications would increase the users’ involvement, and work as some important reminders, e.g. about the following meal.
Such a mental health app would help the patients monitor and reflect on their eating disorder recovery and notice important trends about what seems to help them or hinder them in recovery. And, what’s important, they would do it under the supervision of a health professional, using a one-way messaging functionality to let the health professional leave relevant comments and suggestions.
In such a way the InsideOut self monitoring app would help their clients to monitor and reflect on their progress in recovery.
Story
Story
The client noted that their existing web app version of the self monitoring features was better suited to a dedicated mobile app in order to leverage the convenience of a mobile phone during important times such as meals or distressing situations. The client approached Apiko to create a companion app for the web version, converting the existing site while using best practice mobile design to make the app easy to use and engaging.
Challenges & solutions
See the challenges, and solutions we’ve offered to our clients
Come up with the design for a mobile application
Build a frontend solution for the healthcare mobile app
Starting Point
the client provided us with:
The Institute’s eating disorder therapy web platform
Branding materials: information about the preferred stylistics, color theme, and design
Full list of app features and their backend implementation
Elicit and clearly define the healthcare mobile app requirements
Decide upon the user flow and create the clickable prototypes accordingly
Build the mobile app’s front end
Test the developed solution
What our clients say
Check out what our clients think of Apiko
A great team to work with, Apiko go above and beyond. Extremely communicative, very detailed, have a great understanding of how much to involve the client vs. manage things themselves.
Daniel Rogers
Main features
1
Invite a health professional
Let a health professional view and analyze your logs and progress, and leave relevant comments and suggestions to improve the overall treatment.
2
Add a goal
Indicate what you aim to achieve, and the date by which you would like to have accomplished it.
3
Add a food plan
Indicate if your meal is the breakfast, lunch, dinner or a snack
Write a note about it, e.g. indicate what you plan to eat, or anything else you find important
Select date and time when you plan to eat this meal
Choose if you’d like to set a notification about the meal
Choose how you would like to be reminded, including through push notifications
4
Add a thought
Write down the unhelpful thoughts you notice and the related prompting events
On a 10-grade scale estimate how much you believe in those thoughts and how much distress they bring
Pick which emotions the thought has caused
Check if you followed any of the error thinking patterns, like disqualifying your achievements, emotional reasoning, all-or-nothing thinking, catastrophizing, etc.
5
Add behavior entry
Pick one of the types of behavior, e.g. binge eating, restricting some food, night eating, exercise, etc.
State if you engaged in that behavior or if it was only an urge and you didn’t do it
Indicate date and time of this behavior
Write down your related triggers, thoughts and feelings
When applicable, enlist food and beverages consumed
A list of skills that can be helpful, e.g. problem solving, emotions regulation, mindfulness, distraction and pleasant activities, etc., and their description
Check if you thought of applying any of these skills, and if you actually did use them
Write down your reflections and what you would possibly do differently next time
6
Add a food entry
Pick which meal it is - breakfast/ lunch/ dinner/ snack
Enlist food and beverages and/ or attach their photo if you wish
Add notes regarding your thoughts and feelings before and after eating
7
Understand the trends and receive reminders when you need them
Filter your entries by their type (food, food plan, thought, behavior)
Receive calendar reminders: enable push, mobile phone and email notifications
8
Health professionals can monitor and give feedback on clients’ progress
View the patients’ profiles
One-way messaging functionality for health professionals to leave the real-time feedback, comments and suggestions
Technologies
Healthcare mobile app custom development: The outcome
The mobile app for eating disorders and mental health care is the patients’ companion during the whole day, unlike the preceding web therapy platform. As a self monitoring app it offers convenient functionality to make notes whenever needed, and the push notifications keep the users on their way to achieving their goals. HP supervision allows steering patient’s activity in the right direction to aid their treatment.
