MINDtick app psychiatric care study-Digital signal indicators to enhance capacity of psychiatric services to predict distress in advance and intervene early.

MINDtick is a smartphone-based application, that is available for download on both iPhone and Android devices. The app has been designed with the purpose of enabling a mechanism to gather continuous measures of symptoms related to mental illness in an individual’s natural daily environment. The app collects this type of information in two ways; 1) participant facing Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMA) measures; and 2) in-built sensor data. Individuals who are currently receiving any form of psychological or psychiatric treatment for a mental illness will be recruited for the study. Clinicians will be recruited primarily for the use of assisting in the recruitment of eligible participants, and first contact will be made by the two consultant psychiatrists within the research team. All clinicians from each of the two mental health services will be eligible for recruitment, and interested clinicians will be directed to the study website containing the Clinician Information Sheet, Consent form and Registration form. If a clinician registers to participate, a member of the research team will need to approve a clinician's registration in order to gain access any features of the website. Eligible individuals will be approached by their treating healthcare professional during their scheduled visit, where the clinician will ask the patient to read carefully over the information sheet (PICF). Consent to participate is given twice: 1) online, through the website, and 2) additionally when they download the MINDtick application. Additionally, patients will be asked to provide consent for their electronic health records to be accessed as a part of this project. Consenting participants will be asked to use the MINDtick mobile application at least once a week for 6 months. Upon first entry into the app, participants will be prompted to complete once-off demographic questions (e.g., date of birth, gender, country of origin). MINDtick will prompt participant through a push-notification to answer all 8 EMA questions. The prompt reads: “[name of participant], do you have a minute to answer your health questions?”. Prompts to answer EMA questions occur on average 3 times a week, on a predefined random time schedule consisting of 09:00, 11:00, 13:00, 15:00, and 17:00, whereby only one prompt is delivered per day. An online dashboard to graphically display gathered EMA data will be made accessible to consenting clinicians. The dashboard will be checked at least once a week during the study for the duration of the project to monitor participant engagement levels with MINDtick and trends in data for clinical use. The data displayed on the clinician dashboard is specific to the EMA data - that is, clinicians will not have access to passive sensor data collected from the patient’s mobile phone.