Building a Mood Tracker for Digital Health: a Quick Guide

With the increasing stress and negative emotions in our lifestyle, various downbeat thoughts have become more common. These days, people are struggling with their mood swings, concerning their personality and mental health adversely.

This continued mood instability is why mood-tracking applications are coming into play. These apps, which heart goal is to help track moods daily, establish themselves as the right companion for the users. Because of this, this app market is mushrooming, making businesses and investors interested in mood-tracking app development.

But what’s the sense after this market blossoming? How do these applications serve users? What are the benefits of mood-tracking apps? Let’s discover it here.

What Is a Mood Tracker?

A mood tracker is an instrument helping track and control mood regularly. Its chief aim is to observe numerous mood patterns periodically and learn how the state of mind changes with conditions and circumstances. People find such trackers helpful in recognizing and controlling their spirits.

Reasons Behind the Disruption of Mood Tracking App Market

Health Awareness

With time, people are getting concerned not only about their physical health but also their mental one. They are investing their time and efforts into every such activity that gives them peace of mind. Something is possible only when their body secretes positive and healthy emotions for a long time.

It is the prominent explanation why users take account of their moods daily and approach medical specialists if they feel sad, submerging the positive emotions more often.

More Acceptable Managing

It’s a fact: when our mood is not good, we find it challenging to focus on any duty. We cannot analyze anything properly and accurately; it affects slowly and gradually our day-to-day set plans and decision-making capacities.

A mood tracker, in this case, offers the benefit of selecting a long-term record of our mood and quickly identifying the spot patterns and triggering elements. Further, it helps with taking better control of our feelings.

Lacking Healthcare Options

Another reason behind the growing number of people enjoying the benefits of mood tracker apps is the lack of good healthcare options. In various cases, healthcare specialists are overburdened. So, they pay more attention to serious and critical health disorders, completely overlooking the emotions that can later turn into depression and other mental problems.

In this situation, mood tracker apps bridge the gap between healthcare practitioners and patients by providing users with a way to track and analyze their mood fluctuations. Which later helps the specialist to offer them the proper guidance and treatment to relish better mental health.

Developed Lifestyle

These applications keep a long-term record of users’ moods. It relieves the process of identifying triggers and trends and planning changes in the lifestyle. Also, these applications help you determine whether you are taking the proper steps to manage your mood or not.

Due to these benefits, the mood-tracking apps market is flourishing significantly. It is proven to drive a more significant share of the wellness app market size. Knowing this, if you plan to step into the best mood tracker app market, it’s crucial to understand the essential features required to create a mood tracking app.

Types of Mood Trackers

Manual Mood Trackers

While using such apps, users must manually input the facts about how they feel. Such apps offer users a platform to check their mood swing history in graphical form, set reminders, and enhance their mood by performing various things, such as chattering with mates, playing games, or just listening to music.

Mood Trackers + Wearables

Such apps blend manual mood-tracking applications’ functions with automatically accumulating the needed information. These apps use wearable devices to observe psychological responses, such as breathing rates and blood pressure. They use data to form a visual representation allowing users to learn about mental states and what’s going on in their minds and bodies.

Integration with Smartwatches/Fitness Bands

The wearables track the users’ feelings and let them calm down as they come well-integrated with stress and emotion management tools for a more comprehensive approach to well-being and health.

Sync with Fitness Apps

Some apps remind the users to stop for a while and focus on their breathing, which can help them reduce their stress; some ask them to improve their wellness activities.

Spo2 Monitor

Such apps are well-integrated with pulse oximetry, the non-invasive measurement of oxygen saturation (SpO2). This feature leads to a quick assessment of the user’s respiratory function. Integrating the oxygen measurement feature into a wearable device will provide meaningful insights into the wellness and fitness markets, including sleep quality, stress, recovery time, muscle oxygen (VO2), etc.

Sleep Monitor

The sleep trackers are blended with wearables that estimate sleep quality and quantity using small motion sensor accelerometers. This way, the users may seek a doctor’s advice if they find anything misappropriate.

Heart Rate Monitor

Wearables integrated with optical heart-rate monitors use a flashing green light to measure users’ heart rate from their wrists. Users get to know their heart rates. Some wearables track immobility and make a call if unstable heart rates are detected. After the call, a message is sent to the user’s emergency contact, letting them know about their heart health. One example of such is the Apple Watch.

How to Develop a Mood Tracking App?

As you are now aware of why we need mood-tracking mobile applications, we should focus on developing that can help users focus and enhance their wellness.

Get the Individuality

As we all know, the idea is not unique. So, it’s your responsibility to make the mobile app trustworthy to attract more users. The sort of app you are planning to create is not a subject of concern here; what is more important is how you will hold the users engaged. You can choose and involve the latest technologies in your app to make your routine mood-tracking app more fascinating and thrilling. Personalization and gamification are very meaningful for such applications. Personalization reminds the users of their mood goals, so they won’t get too far behind, and help to make connections and understand any pattern of thinking. Gamification, in its turn, enables people to reach their goals in an easy and convenient way of playing.

Manage the Real Cases

Your mobile application should offer a complete solution. We might expect that individuals who download a mood-tracking app are probably in danger of stress or curiosity. Most users need the application to monitor their moods and enhance their mental health. Machine learning in the healthcare industry can do wonders.

Based on this approach, users won’t just see their mood analytics but also grasp their mood’s reliance in different situations. Additionally, your mobile application will offer the best methods to lift their mood or cheer them up by understanding their individual preferences.

Ensure a Result

Do you know that 1 out of 4 people deletes the mobile app after one use? And just 16% give a second chance to the mobile application. So, even if the user downloads the mobile app, you have one chance to keep him engaged.

What we can do here is to show individuals an objective, make sense of why your mood-tracking mobile application is so necessary for them and guarantee them the positive outcomes your app can deliver. For example, you commit that a person would feel more cheerful for the following two weeks if he uses the mobile app once or twice a day. Or on the other hand that utilizing your application, an individual would feel excellent the entire day if they follow the app's guidance precisely.

If you promise something to your users, you better deliver accurate results. You can also offer stats and detailed analysis based on inputs. You can also provide them with a list of exercises that can keep them more cheerful.

Features for Mood Tracking App Development

Mood Diary

As the name says, this mood-tracking app feature lets users feed information about how they feel throughout the day, just like we write our memories and daily achievements in a diary. Various applications ask different sets of detailed questions, which helps users better understand an emotional state, how long they remained in that state, etc.

Mood Chart

Since visual content can aid in learning and analyzing complex information quickly and effortlessly, mood tracking applications also come loaded with the mood chart feature. This feature plots graphs and charts using different dimensions, making it easier for users to focus on any particular time or place and clearly understand their emotional state.

Health Diagnosis

This feature of the mood-tracking mobile application lets users and medical practitioners monitor the health symptoms of the former and get detailed information on their progress in depression, bipolar, anxiety, and other disorders.

Social Media Integration

If a user is having a bad day or is stressed, then there is no doubt that they would want to talk to someone. That is why your app must have a section of a friend list where you can find people to talk to in times of need. You should allow users to add friends from the contact list, social media, or manually by adding a phone number.

Set Goal

“Set a goal” is also a must-have feature to focus upon while investing in developing a mood tracker app. This element lets users set a daily, weekly, or yearly plan and encourages them to take different steps toward achieving these purposes. And this way, it improves their mental health and wellness state.

Statistics & Calendar

Another feature to consider when determining how to create a mood-tracking app is statistics and calendars. This feature again allows users to keep track of their moods over a more extended period and get an estimate of mood swings anytime and anywhere.

Community Support

This feature lets users connect with others worldwide and make a community battling the same psychological issues. These people can support them in making their mental health better by assisting in picking up some new good habits or by simply being there for them to share their ups and downs and identify their emotional cycle.

Mix & Match Games

To enhance your app, integrate games, audio, activities, and tools for mood improvement. Integrating games in your app can engage your users in the best possible way and help relieve their stress, anger, and anxiety.

Integration with Wearables

Your app should undoubtedly support integration with wearable devices to meet consumers’ needs through open API. It would allow users to calculate heart rate, pulse rate, and several other things that will support them keep track of their health. You can also provide your users with tools within the app that help them to find how their thinking patterns cause stress and anxiety.

Integration with Telehealth Platform

It is a proper way to connect with skilled psychiatrists, when it’s necessary, using a phone. This important feature provides online chat messaging, email support, and video & telephone calls through an app. People may use it in order to talk with a doctor and see if they need a physical appointment, assess mood changes professionally, and devise a better plan to fight depression and other ailments.

Tips to Make Your Mood Tracker Fancy

• Add user-friendly navigation — the look and feel of your mood tracker should be user-friendly and subtle. Your users should feel comfy while using the app instead of stressing out. We recommend adding a few design elements, user-friendly features, and easy navigation to your mood-tracking app design.

• Use AI and ML technologies — these technologies will help users see the analytics and understand the effect of various factors on their moods. In addition, using such technologies can help find the best practices to lift the mood or cheer up a user based on personalized suggestions and preferences.

• Add a USP — to make your app stand out, you must add a unique feature. Try to make your app more engaging and helpful for users.

• Do not overuse features — trying to make something unique doesn’t mean you should load your app with irrelevant features. Ensure you don’t confuse your users by adding waste-time features to your app. Instead, try to keep it as subtle and straightforward as possible.

• Use gamification to engage users — by using gamification techniques, you can engage users and make them regular customers of your application. For example, you can reward them with points when they don’t feel stressed or include stress-buster games.

Final Part

Various studies suggest that mental health tracking apps can help improve well-being over time. Although, a mood tracker can’t be considered a substitute or an option for best-quality mental healthcare. If a person with stress or anxiety issues doesn’t find such apps helpful, they should seek advice from their psychiatrist or therapist. But, if your stress or anxiety level is just in an initial phase, a well-crafted and feature-packed app can help you in your journey towards reducing stress and achieving better mental health.