Mental health Mood Rhythm app wins $100,000 prize

Developers of Mood Rhythm, a mobile application to help patients with bipolar disorder, won the $100,000 top prize in the Heritage Open mHealth Challenge for software developers.

“Rhythms guide our lives,” said Tanzeem Choudhury, leader of the winning team and professor of information science at Cornell University, in a news release. “Our biological clocks tell us when we need to sleep, eat and wake. When these rhythms are interrupted or obstructed, it can be difficult for our bodies to get what they need to stay healthy and balanced.”

The prize—co-sponsored by Heritage Provider Network, Marina del Rey, Calif.; the San Francisco-based not-for-profit Open mHealth; and the University of California at Los Angeles—was awarded Tuesday at the 4th annual Health Datapalooza in Washington, D.C. The Heritage network also is sponsoring a $3 million contest for development of a data analytics algorithm to keep patients out of the hospital. Heritage paid out a $500,000 interim prize at the conference Monday for a system aimed at reducing hospital readmissions.

Today's winning application, which runs on both the Apple iOS and Google Android operating systems, “takes advantage of smartphones to track a patient's daily routine and provides feedback to help patients maintain a regular daily rhythm while incorporating this information into clinical decisionmaking,” the news release said. Mood Rhythm “also uses sensors in the phone to track sleep and social activity patterns, providing more information for both patients and clinicians.”

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