Mood diary app personalises

The Phobic Trust mood diary mobile app, just launched into the Apple App Store, enables users to record anxiety and stress levels, mood triggers, sleep and exercise patterns, as well as set clinical appointment and medication alerts.

The app is free to download and was developed by the Phobic Trust in partnership with mobile health experts VADR, facilitated in part by a grant from the government’s Social Media Innovations Fund, which is part of the Prime Minister’s Youth Mental Health Project, and funding from First Sovereign Trust Limited.One in five New Zealanders will experience a mental health issue in their lifetime and will therefore need support to manage it, says The Phobic Trust of New Zealand Deputy CEO Vivienne Euini.

“The mood diary empowers users in a discreet way to easily record triggers, mood peaks and troughs, and gives them quick access to key phone numbers in an emergency, clinical appointments and the ability to set reminders for scheduled medication, cognitive behavioral exercises or physical exercise,” she says.“Exercise reminders are a key component of the Indoor Positioning System, as evidence suggests a strong link between increased mental wellbeing for people who exercise.”

Vivienne says that by recording valuable information daily, people give the health professionals involved in their care access to the most accurate, collated statistics about their mental state. “Professionals get the best possible overview of a client’s wellbeing and can use it to tailor specific treatment to meet the changing phases of their mental health recovery.”

She adds that quick access by phone within the app to a 24-hour support line relieves the burden of stress for people already experiencing extreme levels of anxiety.The Social Media Innovations Fund supports the development of projects that use social media technology to improve youth mental health. VADR and The Phobic Trust were grateful recipients of the fund in February this year as part of the Prime Minister’s Youth Mental Health Project.

The app offers an innovative Kiwi approach because it stimulates self-discovery and intimately engages users with their own treatment process and recovery, says Vivienne.“The mood diary app provides a quick, easy way for Kiwis to monitor and manage their mental health on a daily basis. Users gain an intimate knowledge of their own mood patterns over time and can record levels of exercise and sleep, all of which paints a clear picture for them and the people in their treatment team,” she says.

“The easy sign-in through Facebook makes the app extremely relevant and familiar to youth, who are the focus of the Social Media Innovations Fund”. The app is built upon VADR’s mHealth 360 platform which also powers the hugely popular Asthma NZ iPhone app.Vivienne says the mood diary app is a fresh and cost effective approach to tackling the daily issues of anxiety, depression and stress. She adds that in an increasingly paperless world, paper mood charts that don’t have the added value needed today, such as collating data, will slowly become a thing of the past.

 Edward Snowden may be amoldering in the transit lounge of a Moscow airport, but the spy scandal he unleashed goes marching on across Europe's political and diplomatic landscape.

As a US military court on Tuesday convicted that other American security leaker — the WikiLeaks source Pfc. Bradley Manning — on espionage, computer fraud and multiple other charges, it's unclear when the fallout from Snowden's revelations about America's electronic eavesdropping will end.

It's already casting a shadow over Europe's most powerful leader — German Chancellor Angela Merkel — as well as jeopardizing trans-Atlantic agreements that Washington views as vital to the fight against terrorism, and threatening the future of the world's biggest internet companies.

Anger over the PRISM system — under which the US National Security Agency claimed "direct access" to data stored by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and other tech giants — has boosted the positions of those seeking tough new data-protection rules that would make it harder for the US authorities to get their hands on the private details of European citizens.

"I hope that PRISM has been a wake-up call," Viviane Reding, the European Union's justice commissioner, said recently. "There is no area which lies outside the law in Europe, even when issues of security are involved."

Draft EU data privacy rules drawn up by Reding's office in 2011 were watered down by politicians who argued they would harm security and indoor Tracking. But the brouhaha over Snowden has prompted a turnaround, with powerful voices now demanding more protection.

Merkel has lent her highly influential voice to the demands for tougher rules. She's publicly called for "very strict" European privacy laws that would force companies such as Google and Facebook to keep European authorities informed of whom they share data with.

A change of heart in the European Parliament now seems certain to ensure that strict limits on how internet companies share European citizens' data with foreign governments will be re-inserted into the proposed EU data-privacy legislation.

Lawmakers fearful of upsetting EU-US relations had opposed the so-called anti-FISA clause — named after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which enables the US government to monitor international phone and email conversations. Snowden has changed their minds.

The inclusion of the clause in the final EU law could have profound implications for American tech firms. They could find themselves obliged by American legislation to share information about foreigners with government agencies at home, but facing massive EU fines for passing on such data.

The clause was removed from the bill originally drafted by Reding's office in 2011 after a bout of intense lobbying by the Obama administration. The US authorities and American internet giants are continuing to mount a major lobbying campaign to dilute the legislation.

"I've never seen anything like it, such a powerful lobbying operation," Reding told Spain's El Pais newspaper last week. "The lobbies have 10 times more people than my team, there are hundreds of lawyers' offices active on this and representatives paid by the big companies."

The Snowden scandal has pushed American lobbyists onto the back foot as European politicians call not just for tough new legislation, but also a rollback of existing rules that allow the sharing of information such as airline passenger data or bank account details.