Emotions&Care: Designing a Mobile App for Supporting Depression of College Students

Depression is a mental condition characterized by persistent sadness and a lack of interest or pleasure in previously rewarding and pleasurable activities. College students are a population at high risk for depression. Depression is not only a symptom that college students go through and can easily overcome; ignorance and misinformation can lead college students not to feel accompanied and develop suicidal behavior. In this paper, we present the Emotions&Care app, a mobile application for supporting the depression of college students. We followed the Design Thinking methodology for designing the app. We validated the app’s design with eighteen college students and two psychologists. Our results indicate that Emotions&Care was perceived as useful and easy to use. Our results can be used to design mobile technology to support depression in college students.