The past few years brought some difficulties to humanity. Many people felt a significant need for support and mental health improvement, and general awareness of mental health issues and their influence on daily life occurred.
That’s why the popularity of apps aimed at improving general mental well-being appeared, and now healthcare app development is in significant demand.
Why Develop a Mental Health App?
Unfortunately, the post-Covid period and other worldwide difficulties led to increased mental disorders, and depression is heading the leading position.
However, many people are not receiving treatment due to financial inability or certain prejudices about people experiencing mental issues.
For some, mental health apps became a solution because of their accessibility at any time you feel anxious or abandoned.
Digitalization of healthcare has become a popular, comfortable, and highly demanded option. That’s why many business owners started wondering how to develop a telemedicine app of this type.
Beneficial Part of Developing a Mental Health App
Portable devices allow applying therapy remotely. For example, your smartphone may help control the situation when you feel down. This helps users receive essential care much faster.
But to reach actual efficiency, all advice and methods have to be confirmed.
Mental health apps may become a robust promotional instrument for your service or product.
Don’t underestimate the power of push notifications because they will be the primary way to interact with users. For example, it may remind them to take their medications or about appointment time.
Types of Mental Health Apps
Mainly, all mental health apps help to improve users’ psychological state. But however, there are some applications specialized for specific purposes, such as addiction recovery or current struggles with particular disorders like depression, eating disorders, or insomnia.
Meditation apps support the general wellness of the spirit, providing guides for meditations for beginners and experienced users.
How to Monetize a Mental Health App?
The way to start receiving profit from developing such an app isn’t much different from other services. Anyway, here are the main options you can consider to monetize your application.
- Freemium. This is an excellent way for user engagement. It implies giving users a basic functioning app for free, offering to receive more features for purchasing an advanced app version.
- Subscription. Implementing such a monetization type, your clients are directly offered to pay for content. Payments can be monthly or even customized.
- Advertising. This involves displaying banners or widgets with ads and pop-up videos. But this method is not that multifunctional. Usually ads model is not used among mental disorder apps due to audience specification. However, feel free to implement it into meditation apps.
Feature to Make Your Mental Health App Work
Let’s overview the basic functionalities kit for the MVP version of your product.
Mood Control
This feature is helpful for mentally healthy users and those who are on their way to mental well-being. It allows users to monitor emotional flow, mood swings, and stress patterns.
Reminding Notifications
As we mentioned, this is a working way to interact with users in real-time. You can send notifications to remind them about medication intake, offer a break, or do short breathing exercises to reduce tension.
Gamification
This feature will allow you to turn the treatment process into a simple, pleasant game that may increase customer engagement. Short mini-games may improve users’ mental condition and attach them to an app more.
Simple Dashboards
This feature helps users trace their progress. It also may contain statistics that show changes and patterns in their mood conditions.
Emergency Cases Support
While dealing with such a kind of sensitive audience, it is vital to provide them with a feeling of safety. Whenever users are facing a panic attack or start hyperventilating, such a function may help to turn it down or at least help reduce such conditions’ influence.
Interesting Educational Materials
Providing some educational materials may assist users in understanding themselves and guide them in navigating their experience.
Possible Challenges While Developing Mental Health App
While being involved in a topic that firmly touches healthcare, people must receive the actual therapeutic effect. And that’s why it is important to work according to a list of strict rules and requirements.
Data Security
Constant dealing with sensitive data must be backed up with strong security measures. It must be protected from any type of cyber crimes activity.
Many protection methods of system security may help to reduce the possibility of private data leaks and theft.
For instance, such practices include multi-factor authentication, which requires a password to log into an account, and other verification aspects, such as phone number confirmation or biometrical access.
Don’t forget to encrypt necessary EHR data. At least you can do this for users’ data using standard encrypting types AES 128.
As for laws and rules, most mental health apps do not follow HIPAA requirements and don’t spread users’ personal information to third-party parties.
But if your app is pointed exactly to a psychiatrist’s cure for specific issues, you must complete detailed research about what general and local laws to follow.
Drug Prescription
It is convenient to let users receive their medication refilled by cooperating with an app. Such an option allows patients to save time and, finally, digitalize the process of drug prescriptions.
Online Therapy Platform
It’s an excellent solution for people who don’t have time or are uncomfortable attending real meetings. Such platforms can be accompanied by chat, phone, or email support.
Functionalities Development
To choose all the necessary tools for building a superior and high-functional application, you must overview and analyze the whole concept, its complexity, primary goals, and financial aspect.
For full functionality for a mental health app, you’d most likely need Python for back-end development, Javascript for the front-end, and PostgreSQL for the solid database.
Mental Health App Development Expenses
Development costs may vary according to the team’s hourly rate and level of specialist proficiency you’d choose, your personal demands, the number of features, the decision to make a native or cross-platform solution, etc.
The creation process structure includes the following steps:
- Business strategy analytics
- Main concept highlight and additional requirements
- Visualization
- The back-end and front-end development
- Quality assurance
- Maintenance and launch
Including the above-mentioned processes, demanded functionality, and technical stack, an approximate Mental Health app development cost ranges from $60,000 to $150,000+.
However, if you plan to add machine learning and AI power or maintain your app in the future, the final cost may significantly differ.
Author bio
Yuliya Melnik is a technical writer at Cleveroad. She is passionate about innovative technologies that make the world a better place and loves creating content that evokes vivid emotions.
