Development and testing of a mobile application for identifying individuals high risk for depression in the general population

Introduction. Information Technology (IT) is a promising and quickly developing scientific and practical fileld. One of its traits is its ability to provide big numbers of people with everyday access.to information and tools. Our goal was to develop a mobile tool that can help measure the Ievel of psychiatric symptoms in any given person and without making any clinical diagnoses, offer that person information about probable conditions they might have and help they can get. In order for such an application to be available to the majority of smartphone users, we decided to incorporate into it the less-formal tools or measuring psychiatric symptoms.

The first test we included was the Luscher test as it is a rather well-investigated in relation to mood disorders tool that can be used as a screening method. The first dimension of psychiatric conditions we examined was affective disorders since they are common and in many cases their severity does not prevent people from using applications such as ours.

0bjectives. Our aim  was  to  check  the  ability  of  the  short (8-color) version of the Lusher test introduced in a mobile gaming appllication, to differentiate patients with affective disorders from healthy individuals and to assess the severity of accompanying symptoms.

Methods. The respondents were 62 healthy individuals and 17 in-patients with a diagnosis of an affective disorder (F32) under going treatment.    For assessing the severity of depression we used the QIDS-SR16 inventory which has high sensitivity at the lowest grades of depressive symptoms. The application we developed as a part of Total Games company Goodville project was on its face «farm» gaming application in which user is asked to plant trees and vegetables, gather the foods and communicate with characters. The test we incorporated into it was the short (8-color) version of the Lusher test, which includes questions about a color that is most or least preferred at the moment and choice of that color from 8 specific ones. 

To learn more about the study results, please check the full article - click here.