Abstract:

Background and Aim: Mental disorders are the leading cause of disability in the world with multiple negative effects, which can increase the risk of other diseases. Moreover, mental health has a positive influence on the treatment of diseases, which highlights the importance of mental health. Considering the development of new opportunities in mental health services provided by mobile technological advances, the present study aimed to investigate the applications of mobile health for patients mental health promotion.

Materials and Methods: This secondary research was conducted by searching the electronic databases of SCOPUS, proquest, pubmed and google scholar as well as keywords mental health, mobile health, smartphone, mobile mental health and mental health promotion. Among the resources that were associated with both the concept of mobile health and mental health were investigated for the study. All published literature in English was related from 1994-2015 and all published literature in Persian was related from 1385-1394.

Results: It seems that the use of mobile health can improve patients mental health due to the applications such as training, reducing the fear associated with the stigma of mental illness, notification, tele-psychotherapy, telecommunication, medication accuracy certainty, the possibility of self-care, patients’ self-reporting, automatic data sampling, behavioral patterns recognition, data visualization, therapeutic feedback, identification of a patient’s mental status, evaluation of a mental patient’s physical activity and predicting a patient’s real-time behavior.