Making cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) work for smartphone users could prove both beneficial to the users, and lucrative for the company making an app that will actually be used on a regular basis.

Moodnotes features a playful interface that lets users easily log their mood by swiping up or down on a face to move from neutral to happy or sad.To make that happen, LA-based mHealth app maker Thriveport has teamed up with London-based digital product studio ustwo, which is most famous for its minimalist mobile game Monument Valley.

So the duo came up with an app called Moodnotes, which is a health journal that allows users to capture their feelings and improve their thinking habits, according to Alana Wood, ustwo UX designer. “It couples positive psychology with CBT and off the back of logging your mood it acts as a catalyst to get you into journaling and then it’s through the journaling that we tailor the content, in quite a simple way, whether your mood is more up or down… to prompt users to think more in depth about the situations that they’re facing and how they’re feeling and thinking whilst they’re in those situations,” she said.

Compared to Thriveport’s first app, MoodKit, Moodnotes provides a more streamlined experience with a more fixed focus on mood tracking and journaling as a way to help users understand and modify their thought processes with the aim of promoting general emotional wellbeing. The application features a playful interface that lets users easily log their mood by swiping up or down on a face to move from neutral to happy or sad. From there they can do a quick save and leave it at that if they just want to do mood tracking; or add more details – at which point the app prompts them to start journaling feelings behind the mood they just recorded, including the ability to tag entries with positive or negative feelings (such as ‘anxious’ or ‘content’). The flow of the app will dynamically change depending on the emotions the user expresses.

The flow of the app will dynamically change depending on the emotions the user expresses.“Depending on if you’re feeling low then it will start to bring in that CBT content to help you to unpack in more detail how you were thinking and approaching the situation – and then it will kind of give you an antidote in terms of how to think about things differently for the future and what to look out for,” says Wood.

Moodnotes also charts mood logging so users can get an overview of their emotional state over time. It is readily available to download for iPhone and Apple Watch for $3.99.

[Via: TechCrunch]