An Irish researcher based in the US has been awarded a $100,000 (€75,000) prize for his work on a mental wellness app for smartphones that aims to help those with mood disorders.
Dr Mark Matthews, who is based at New York’s Cornell University, leads the research team that won the US Heritage Open mHealth Challenge with MoodRhythm, a software application to help those with disorders such as bipolar to learn about their rhythms and stay in balance.
The app is available for i-Phone and Android smartphones, and uses the phones’ sensors to monitor things such as sleep, social patterns, user-provided information such as food routines, activity and mood. For the sleep module, sensors monitor everything from the amount of light in a room to how often a person interacts with their phone. The phone’s microphone plays a big part in the monitoring of social interactions too, checking for the sound of the user’s voice, the type of environment they are in and if there are multiple people present.
Dr Matthews said the data was collected in a way that was sensitive to privacy, with all the calculations done on the phone rather than uploaded to a third party.
He is currently spending two years in the US, and is due to return to Trinity College Dublin next year.
