Today, we’re sharing some of our findings on methods of recording and charting mood as part of Buddy development work.
As we would hope during the R&D phase of the project we started to hone down our concept to something which would be mutually useful to both the user and their chosen support network. We wanted to provide an alternative kind of assistive device which addressed the users emotional state rather than their vital signs as most AT does. We wanted to let people broadcast their current mood, a bit like a Facebook status update, to their network of friends, family and professional care workers. Our first thought was that this would be just a word or short phrase to describe their state, which they would select from a pre-programmed list using their Buddy device.
During our conversations with mental health service users and the service providers at SLaM it became apparent that monitoring mood is not an unfamiliar practice – it is often used in cognitive behaviour therapy – but requires a greater degree of sophistication than trying to do a ‘Facebook’. I thought I’d show you some.
The Daily Mood Chart
This records not only the mood but also the things that can affect mood i.e sleep, exercise, medication or alcohol intake. This way doctors can see the possible triggers of a patients symptoms. The user is asked to record their mood on a scale of -4 to +4. This provides a really useful level of detail but it seems like it could be time consuming and eventually boring to fill in everyday. We don’t like forms anyway.
—————————————————
Mood charting is becoming more popular. This is one of the good ones we found, it’s an iPhone app and a desktop application which makes it convenient to use. It is very precise and detailed, probably a bit complicated for people who aren’t particularly digital. After filling in the records the app will automatically generate a graph with the data. It’s useful to have the data in this format as you can immediately see the relationship between your mood and what’s happened throughout the day.
There’s so much detail to record on the app we can’t even fit a good screen grab of the whole window below!
We like the slide bars and easy tick boxes.
—————————————————
Dr Liz Miller, author of recently published, ‘Mood Mapping’ has developed a chart which records mood in a slightly different way with an axis of high and low energy and positive and negative mood. This adds another dimension to understanding the mood. Liz, who is both a trained neuro-surgeon and has first hand experience of bipolar disorder, believes this to be the best way to record our moods . We like the simplicity of the interaction and the detail it offers but can see limitations (or is that complications?) in mapping moods and seeing trends over time.
By keeping a chart each day the user could potentially start to see a pattern of mood at times of day. With this increased self-awareness the user can take steps to change their daily routines to avoid big lows.
—————————————————
Color Mood Charts
Some people are more able to communicate in a visual way. The chart below allows the user to select a colour that represents their mood. The word prompts provide a guide so anyone can interpret the mood the user wanted to communicate by selecting the colour. This key is really important because the mood some people associate with certain colours are completely subjective. Many scientists have written about the association between mood and colour. i.e red is hot firey colour and is said to prompt people to feel energized emotions, fear, passion, agitation and anger.
These charts aren’t used in medical practice to our knowledge but we thought the visual colour prompt created a deeper level of interaction for the user when selecting their mood. A word doesn’t always some up a mood completely, we need to understand the shades or intensity of this mood too.
Follow the Buddy Development Blog
Tags: Buddy
Leave a comment...