Choosing the right mental health care within personal and cultural context

The Hartree Centre has helped SME Oh My Mood to build a multi-lingual digital application called Context to assist healthcare providers in monitoring and treating mental health conditions.

Challenge

In healthcare, language barriers can exclude many individuals from screening and treatment, while cultural and contextual factors can influence assessment outcomes. The COVID-19 pandemic only reinforced the demand for remote care and accelerated the use of digital tools to care for mental health. Oh My Mood develops innovative healthcare pathways, aiming to contribute to affordable and futureproof mental healthcare. The company sought to develop an inclusive and personalised digital assessment tool to support healthcare practitioners with assessing their service users living with mental health difficulties. The tool had to be culturally and contextually smart, easily accessible, widely employable, adaptive and comprehensive.

Approach

Funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Bridging For Innovators programme and LCR4.0 START, Oh My Mood collaborated with the Hartree Centre to streamline and integrate the patient journey by building an application which could host services such as mental health questionnaires and provide recommendations for tools and techniques they may benefit from. The team prepared the app for regulatory approval as a medical device, ensuring data was secure and anonymised and developed secure login systems with varying user privilege levels. The Hartree Centre also helped the company to experiment with expanding language availability for the app (currently Dutch and English) to identify and solve potential issues e.g. how to accommodate languages that don’t read left-to-right.

Benefits

The app will streamline parts of the healthcare process that can be completed remotely by the patient, reducing waiting times for patients at a lower cost to the healthcare provider or insurer. Oh My Mood aims to expand into new markets with this service, such as NHS Trusts and other UK healthcare providers, augmenting the work of medical professionals to speed up the assessment of patients and make more accurate recommendations for treatment. The company plan to continue extending the app’s capabilities, bring in new data sources and provide additional insights to aid decision-making and assist in medical research.

Thanks to the Hartree Centre we were able to transfer a very limited scientific tool into not only a market ready tool, but also into an incredible solid base for further innovation towards personalized mental health care.

Pauline Post, Oh My Mood