Companion Bipolar Mood Tracker
Companion uses your smartphone and already existing phone sensors to track 4 important factors that help your mood: activity levels, sleep, food intake and social engagement. The app automatically tracks these measures using machine learning and helps to provide insight as to how certain activities throughout the day help boost your mood and keep it within balanced measures, all without user input.
The app is mainly for patients with bipolar disorder and helps track variability in mood as it goes up and down during day to day activities. By using machine learning, Companion learns about your day to day activity levels and starts to understand and recognize deviations from your normal, balanced mood. People with mood disorders need to track their mood and accompanying physiological and social well-being in order to better understand how their mood varies on a daily basis. Usually, the mood measurement is done on a scale from 0 - 10, 5 being a balanced mood, 0 is severe depression and 10 being manic.
When deviations occur, the app will recognize these specific deviations (whether in sleep, activity levels or social engagement) and help offer tips and warnings to bring you back to a balanced mood measurement. As such, the app uses the most established, highly efficacious treatment style for patients with bipolar (Interpersonal and Social Rhythm Therapy - IPSRT for short). IPSRT is integrated within the app in a way to keep track of your daily routine and disturbances to it. Early on, Companion will ask you multiple times a day what activity category you’re engaging in and will associate a mood with it. This helps Companion learn to automatically track your mood later on.
Tracking your mood as a patient with a mood disorder is extremely vital for you and your caretaker (psychiatrist or therapist) in helping you understand how certain deviations from a normal, balanced routine can lead to disturbances in your mood and subsequently, cause your depressive or manic symptoms to increase.