Technology and Mental Health

The purpose of this special issue is to update the reader on the latest clinical advances in mobile technology and mental health. This issue covers everything from the use of smart phones to detect mood and anxiety to proof-of-concept tests of video games as interventions for mood disorders. This issue presents nine papers on this topic. Three papers focus on the use of digital monitoring for clinical decision making. The Experience Sampling Method as an mHealth Tool to Support Self-monitoring, Self-Insight and Personalised Health Care in Clinical Practice paper by van Os and colleagues shows how regular, brief assessments through the mobile phone can show variations in psychopathology in daily life and predict the development of psychopathology on an individual basis. This methodology can be blended with routine care and has the potential to improve outcomes and reduce costs. Digital Technology and Clinical Decision-Making in Depression Treatment: Current Findings and Future Opportunities by Hallgren and colleagues reviews the literature on the use of smart phones and wearable activity monitors as measures of depression. As was found in this paper, there is considerable promise for these tools to monitor patients between sessions to assess their daily functioning in real time. Finally, the paper Mobile Assessment of Heightened Skin Conductance in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder by Roffman et al. demonstrates that the use of a low-cost mobile device for assessing psychophysiological hyperarousal reactivity in those with PTSD is feasible. The possibility to use such data in clinical practice has become possible and feasible and has great promise for improving the effects of current treatments...