mHealth- Advances, Knowledge and Patient Engagement

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Otroligt - det här är verkligen något som kan göra skillnad i människors liv. Och inte bara för den som är sjuk utan för alla människor.

This article discusses one of the many smart phone applications that has been created in order to help alleviate the symptoms of Schizophrenia, and other unpredictable mental disorders (Alba, 2014). The primary application that is discussed is called "Priori" (Alba, 2014). Priori is designed to monitor a patient's tone when he is speaking, along with the periods of time that he isn't speaking (Alba, 2014). It focuses on the speed and tone of his talking, and any rapid changes in topic that may occur (Alba, 2014). Any offsets that Priori records in the patient's regular way of communicating may help him to better predict an impending Schizophrenic episode. These sort of episodes can not only be dangerous to ones-self, but potentially to those around the individual experiencing the episode (Myers & Myers, 2008). Symptoms may include something as basic as laughing or crying at inappropriate times, or potentially as severe as immobility and even hallucinations (Myers & Myers, 2008). Schizophrenia is considered to be one of the most severe examples of "psychosis," or "a broad term for a disorder marked by irrationality, distorted perceptions, and lost contact with reality (Myers & Myers, 2008, p. 562)," because it may not necessarily be consistent, and can be onset at any given time (Alba, 2014). With that being said, although Priori is still in it's developmental phase, this application has the potential to warn patients and their doctors of an impending episode, so that they can better prepare, and ideally make the episode minimally damaging to the patient, and those around him/her (Alba, 2014).

This article is very well-written, and appears to be reliable because of several different sources cited throughout, including Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, a psychiatrist in chief at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center (Alba, 2014). Any scientific information that was included about Schizophrenia or other mental disorders seemed to be accurate because it was given to the author by physicians, and even an actual mental disorder patient, named Bryan Timlin (Alba, 2014). If I were to recommend any changes in order to help the author verify the accuracy of this article, I would suggest the inclusion of a full reference page that will give any contributors all of the credit that they deserve, while giving readers the tools to do some research on their own.

The following is the full-text citation of the textbook that I discussed in my review of this article, along with a citation for the article itself:

Alba, D. (2014, November 20). "How Smartphone Apps Can Treat Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia" - Wired. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/2014/11/mental-health-apps/

Myers, D. G., & Myers, D. G. (2008). Schizophrenia. In Exploring Psychology in Modules(9th ed., pp. 562-568). Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books?id=ReckAAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&authuser=2&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&hl=en&output=reader&pg=GBS.PA568