Market Overview: A Push For Winners
The market demand for mental health apps is increasing rapidly. The Statista 2021 shows, Calm app was the most downloaded meditation and sleep app in the United States accounting for 40 percent of downloads. The apps helped people to improve their sleep habits and bring a healthy routine into their life.
The Emerging Need To Develop Mental Health Apps
- Immediate And Better Access To Mental Healthcare Now that time has elapsed when people used to schedule physical appointments and wait for hours just to get mental health consultation or treatment. Now patients can go for digital visits without actually hampering their daily schedules. The audio or video calls are the new ways of eliminating appointment scheduling stress and creating a relaxing environment all around.
- Maintain Anonymity Of The Patients Many times, people are scared of sharing their identity while taking mental health treatment. But mental health apps allow the freedom to hide their identity and keep their personal information anonymous which eventually increases the no. of patients. An onymity also leads to building patients’ trust and self-confidence.
- Remote Location Timely Treatment Not everyone has a mental health practitioner in their locality and thus it becomes a barrier for patients to visit a long way to consult the mental health practitioner. Whereas, mental health apps allow patients to connect with a therapist within seconds using video/audio calls. Connecting digitally also eliminates emergencies and even patients can get special tips and suggestions related to mental health.
- Enhances Communication Between Patients and Therapists The digital platform allows both patients and therapists to be in their comfort zone. They can connect 24/7 whenever needed and can share real facts for better treatment. Also, therapists get the opportunity to share special offers, important information, and other related notifications. The ease of connecting and sharing every little information with just a few clicks is what a mental health app provides.
- Bring Efficiency With Record Keeping and Monitoring The mental health apps help the therapists to draw more precise conclusions and provide the best advice to the patients. Many times, therapists suggest patients use the app and track their daily data so that they can detect the problem easily and provide the best possible solution.
Top Mental Health App Ideas For 2022
- Emotional Wellness App Mental health apps are digital platforms that are specially designed to deal with mental health issues. The app takes care of all the instability of one’s thoughts, emotions, and stress level by finding out the triggering factors. It keeps sending little reminders about emotional misbalance and spreading self-awareness to cope with life’s challenges.The apps help to follow these essential stages that ultimately leads to better emotional health:
- Self-screening/monitoring- It helps in determining different symptoms of current mental health.
- Providing help- It introduces the triggering factors on which a person needs to work on.
- Support in sticking to your plan- It offers a set of mindfulness music, exercises, and other activities to engage a person in better activities.
- Promote mental well-being in your life- By sending regular motivational quotes and tips, it manages to keep a person’s mental well-being in life.
- Meditation And Mindfulness App Meditation app is the new sticky on the home screens of smart phone these days especially after the pandemic has hit the world hard. People were forced to stay at home and work which created a lot of pressure and anxiety. In the same backdrop, meditation landed as the best route to stay calm. These apps are aimed at supporting users to reduce the pace of increasing thoughts, to release negativity, and to let body and mind stay in a peaceful zone.Some of the excellent reasons to use mindfulness apps are:
- Increases the level of positive emotions
- Helps in improving self-acceptance
- Lowers the fatigue level
- Reduces sense of external pressure
- Enhance individual focus and reduces mind wandering
- Mood And Symptom Tracking Apps Sometimes it is really difficult to understand the mood swings and the reason behind them. But now mood and symptom tracking apps have made it easy to analyze human activity and find the best suitable solution for it. The user can keep a track of the mood and symptoms by taking regular assessments to gain clarity on their current mental condition. Some apps show mood swings through calendars and graphs. Also, people can choose to note down their thoughts to keep detailed records of their thoughts.Some of the reasons to use mood and symptom tracking apps:
- It helps in managing mood and feeling better
- Provides you a roadmap to manage your lifestyles in a better way
- Help in making better and informed health decisions
- It leads to the prevention of negative mood triggers
- Encourages in working for improved quality of life
- Virtual Therapy App As the name suggests the virtual therapy apps allow users to connect with the therapists from the comforting spaces of their homes. Anyone suffering from stress, anxiety, or any other related mental health issues can search for the suitable therapist and share every other issue without hesitating.The app provides engaging options to communicate with each other i.e. allow video and audio calls with the therapists. The usage of these apps is not only restricted to the users but therapists can also increase their customer reach by connecting with other therapists and getting a huge customer database.There are some other benefits of using virtual therapy apps like:
- It is a good choice for people in remote areas
- It promotes higher affordability and convenience
- App For Women’s Well-Being Women are the most sensitive yet hard-working creations on earth and that is why they need some extra care. The apps for women’s well-being are specially designed to track mood swings and their menstrual cycle. Women can easily find the list of doctors, therapists, and other healthcare practitioners. There is an option to conduct video and audio calls through which women can connect with the experts and seek the best advice and treatment to deal with their mental health issues. The app can also suggest guided meditations and other stress-relieving activities to bring peace and calm in women’s life.
- Sleep App The app is specially designed for folks who are suffering from a lack of good sleep every night. The app can help people to feel rejuvenated and stress-free so that people can sleep properly by leaving all their worries. The user gets the option to enjoy some soothing music and different audios that offer a peaceful sleep.
How To Build A Mental Health App?
Developing a mental health app is a strategic task where one needs to consider essential features that effortlessly fit in the market demand and expectations. Make sure to design a simple user interface and skip all the unnecessary data that depart the user.
Steps To Develop A Robust Mental Health App
- Discover target audience and platform Developing a mental health app is a critical task and to make it a success, one needs to have a clear vision about it. Choose the target audience based on certain demographics like children, teenagers, senior citizens group, LGBTQ+, and many other migrants.Or else, if you have a bigger picture in mind then you can choose to have a broader target audience.Now the next step will be to choose a suitable platform for the app development like Android, iOS, or cross-platform.
- Conduct competitive and market research Competitive research is the best method to know the success and downfall of the previous and current marketing practices. Therefore, it is always suggested to not restrict your study to the success stories but always have a look at the market failures also to plan your smart practices for the same.
- Create a strategic detailed plan Before moving ahead it is crucial to have a detailed business plan that brings clarity to your thoughts and removes trial and error methods and unnecessary wastage of time. It is a kind of summary that you are drawing in front of you. There’s no doubt that there will be some adjustments or changes in the plan but still, it will bring efficiency and cost-effectiveness to the app development process.
- Hire an experienced team of developers To hire an expert team for the app development, there are usually two options i.e. either hire a team of individual freelancers based on their skills and expertise or hire an experienced mobile app development company having an expert team.The type of resources you will require in your team are:
- Android/ iOS developers
- UI/UX designers
- Server-side developers
- Quality assurance specialists
- Project manager
However, it is suggested to hire a company because app development is not about fulfilling the technical requirements but also focusing on the legal requirements in the healthcare and wellness sector.
There are a few permissions needed from healthcare authorities and experts which need to be handled before investing time, effort, and budget in the app development.
- Build an MVP Creating an MVP is a great practice used to speed up the development process and slow down unnecessary costs and efforts. This practice is widely used in the app development industry as it allows bringing improvements and getting clear set feedback from the clients and users.This stage has much importance especially in the healthcare industry because a poor UI may impact the health of the users. He/she may feel much stressed instead of healing their anxiety and bringing calmness to the mind.
- Monitor and testing It is necessary to test and monitor the app before releasing it in the market because app development is a sensitive process just like the mental health of a human. Also, testing helps the development to identify the bugs, glitches, and increase the quality of the app. Testing and monitoring is also one way of creating a good market reputation for the mental health app.
- Share release and required updates Once the development team is done with the testing part then the app is ready to be released in the market. Now, multiple tools and performance metrics must be used to analyze results and bring the necessary updates for better user engagement.
Top Mental Health Apps in the Market
- HeadspaceHeadspace is a meditation app that has its name recalled to encourage users to deal with a healthy and stress-free life. Both beginner and advanced level people can use it easily. The app is used to gain higher satisfaction levels and with affordable monthly prices.
- MoodkitAs the name suggests, it offers a bunch of activities that helps a person to fix their mood. The app emphasizes changing a person’s thoughts and encourages them to practice self-awareness to maintain a healthy attitude for a healthy life.
- MindShiftThe app is specially designed to deal the human anxiety situations. The app can be used free of cost and therefore it is used widely. The special technique used in psychotherapy.
- HappifyThe major aim of the app is to reduce anxiety, stress, negative thinking and to take care of emotional well-being. It has many in-built games, activities and other engaging tasks to bring happiness to your brain.
- MindDocThe app helps the users to get clear statistics of the mood swings and let them maintain better emotional and mental health. Also, it offers a range of meditation and other useful sessions to improvise the emotional health of a user.
Summing Up!
Mental health apps have taken a huge market share and also a lot of space in human life. With the changing lifestyles and increasing trends, the mental energies are blemishing and creating a need to use these trends. So, we have enough market demand, ideas, and strategies to heal the cause and bring a revolutionary change in the market. This article has given enough information, to begin with, but, there is always a scope to add more.
Now, to gain success in your path of mental health app development, you can connect with an experienced team of technical experts at Codiant to gain a lot of insights, facts, and suggestions. You are just an effort away to frame a picture of your ideas.