When Apple’s latest software updates drop this month, users will have access to mental health and wellness features unlike anything currently available in a smartphone. With the Apple Watch and iOS health app, Apple has long striven to cement itself in the health-care tech space. But the new features go beyond the standard heart rate, sleep, calorie and fitness trackers that have become universal in smart tech.
A new mood tracker (dubbed “State of Mind”) will ask users to rate how they feel both in random moments (from unpleasant to pleasant) and daily. Mental health questionnaires will provide users with a preliminary screening for depression (using the PHQ-9 screening tool) and anxiety (using the GAD-7 screening tool) that can alert them to their risk levels and connect them to licensed professionals in their area.
Finally, Apple is introducing a journaling app that can collect user data from photos, texts, music/gaming/TV history, location, fitness etc. to give users a holistic picture of each day.
Those who use Apple’s ecosystem know that it’s extensive and powerful, and true Apple devotees will use an Apple product for nearly every digital experience they have.
This means Apple is in the position to arrive at unique insights about a user’s life. What they’re proposing in iOS 17 is to essentially hold a mirror up to their users, allowing them to see their lives through their interactions with technology.
Tracking mental state
As a philosopher of psychology who studies how technology is changing the way people relate to their mental health, and as an avid Apple fan, I wanted to try out these new features as soon as possible. I downloaded the public beta software in July and want to share my insights about how we might approach this new technology.
The State of Mind tool is simple to use. When opening the Health App after updating to iOS 17, I was prompted to start tracking my mental state. I can choose to log a state at a specific time (for example, how did I feel at 2:30 p.m. today?), or to log my mental state for the day.
The sliding scale of mental states is visually appealing. The screen turns blue when I slide to the “unpleasant” options and orange when I slide to the “pleasant” options.
After settling on a mental state, users are prompted to give some context.
First, there’s a predetermined list of emotions that might describe the user’s mental state (for example, “anxious,” “content,” “happy,” “excited”), and then a list of factors that might be contributing to that mental state (such as “work,” “friends,” “current events”). Here users can write in something specific that will be included in the log.
If they use it daily, users can access a calendar of daily mental states and a graph that visualizes the cycle of states over a given week, month or year. Clicking on any data point will pull up the details of that day, any momentary moods the user logged and the context the user provided.
The user interface functions similarly to the other health metrics Apple already logs. It is a minimalist design that offers easily digestible data. Users can access mental state metrics on the home screen of the app with their other health data.
