Patenting Digital Mental Health

Mental health and behavioural disorders have a profound impact on wellbeing worldwide, with an estimated 13% of the global population suffering from a mental health or substance use disorder ¹.

Monitoring and managing mental health conditions poses a unique set of problems for clinicians, researchers, and patients. Many mental health disorders are chronic and relapsing, and thus there is a need to provide long term follow up and assessment in order to improve patient outlook and determine a correct intervention. Reliance on self-reporting to detect a relapse or monitor progress can be unreliable due to recall bias and deliberate misreporting of symptoms. The ubiquitous nature of mobile and wearable technology provides a profound opportunity for large-scale collection of passive behavioural data. This has caused a huge increase in interest in building so-called digital mental health products² by making use of sensors, big data, and computational techniques such as