Redesign of an m-Health Application for Individuals with Bipolar Disorder: A Strategy for User Adherence and Effective Data Collection

Bipolar Disorder (BD) is a condition marked by fluctuations in mood, activity, and self-awareness of the illness that impacts around 1.9% of individuals worldwide. Several studies involving m-health applications to monitor patients with BD have shown contributions preventing and detecting those fluctuations early, avoiding extreme consequences to the patient’s health and well-being. Those systems usually require daily patient feedback on their condition, thus, the lack of compliance with those reports may significantly influence study quality. This paper presents the redesign process of an m-health application to collect data on people with BD, applying strategies to improve user adherence and appropriate data collection, tested in 14 BD persons. Results show that adherence to our solution was 88.87%, and participants do not relate battery drain with the proposed app. Furthermore, it allows improved data analysis in subsequent studies.