Category Archives: info

PsyMate™ in a practice

PsyMate™️

As a practitioner (specialist, therapist, doctor) you’re looking for ways to help your patients as much as possible. A person’s mental state can play an important role. At that level PsyMate can be a valuable addition to your treatment.

The PsyMate™ app asks at different times during the day how your patient is doing at that time. Where he or she is? With whom? Is he or she active? To what extent are there feelings of stress, anger or sadness? Does someone take medication? Or stimulants? The questionnaires can be programmed so that they are applicable for all kinds of medical and psychiatric disorders. Think for example of anxiety after heart failure, measuring pain after an operation, monitoring of depressive symptoms and help when reducing medication. The data collected through your patient’s PsyMate, ensures reliable self-observation that gives clues you can use for your interventions. Therapy becomes a co-production and participants are stimulated to direct themselves.

The PsyMate™ app is being developed by the Department of Psychiatry at Maastricht UMC + as a means to get a grip on psychological problems in everyday life. Programs around depression, bipolar disorder and psychosis have been thoroughly and scientifically tested. We are quite ambitious with development plans in terms of Parkinson’s disease, pain, cardiology, hypertension, diabetes and Irritable Bowel Syndrome. If you’re interested, don’t hesitate to contact us to discuss together how we can implement the PsyMate™ in your practice.

You can have the PsyMate™ programmed in a way that you get a tailored solution for your patients. Moreover, using the PsyMate™ is practical and time-saving. We would like to discuss with you how PsyMate can be used in your practice, don’t hesitate to contact us.

PsyMate™ in research

PsyMate™️

You are a researcher or physician and you are interested in the behaviour or emotion of people. With the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), you can get immediate feedback on how your selected study population functions in ‘normal’ everyday life. By using the PsyMate™ app you can easily incorporate ESM in your research project. Your subjects download the app on their phones from the App (iOS) or Play Store (Android). Your questionnaires are fine-tuned in collaboration with the specialised PsyMate™ programmers. When connected to the internet data gets sent directly to a database which makes it easy to analyse. The app is suitable for very large study populations, but also for the so-called n = 1 studies. This is particularly interesting for medical studies because you are able to measure the influence of medication, pain or stressors on the participants’ daily functioning. Even when you don’t belong to the medical community there are possibilities for research on the crossroads of behaviour, emotion and (social) context.

The PsyMate™ has some important practical properties: it is easy to use, capable of storing all the data (no internet connection needed once logged in to your study) and it can be programmed in a way that it is interactive (responsive to user input). The data is stored immediately, allowing it to be automatically analysed and shown in a graphical way. The PsyMate™ is suitable for use as a monitoring device for long stretches of time, because it is less intense and time-consuming for the user than any pen-and-paper method whatsoever.

The PsyMate™ app was developed by the Department of Psychiatry at Maastricht UMC + as a means to get to grips on psychological problems in everyday life. Programs involving depression, bipolar disorder and psychosis have been thoroughly and scientifically tested. The ambitions are high with development plans in terms of, among other things, Parkinson’s disease, pain, cardiology, hypertension, diabetes and Irritable Bowel Syndrome. We invite fellow scientists to help us expand the possibilities of the PsyMate™.

We emphasize that individual PsyMate™ data remain strictly personal. In scientific research respondents give informed consent allowing the researchers to use the data in their studies. Individual patient data remains anonymous and are never shared with third parties.

PsyMate™ for myself

PsyMate™️

An app to really get a grip on your mood? A way to work on your recovery yourself? That’s possible! We’d like to present the PsyMate™: a practical and scientifically based tool to get a grip on psychological and physical problems.

The PsyMate™ beeps at different times during the day and asks how you are doing at that moment. Where are you? With whom? What are you doing? To what extent do you experience feelings of stress, anger or sadness? Are you hungry, sleepy or craving for a cigarette? A tool that can be adapted to your personal or medical situation. You can use the PsyMate™ alone, but also with your doctor, therapist or a family member. By filling out the questions you get an insight in how you feel. When are you feeling good and when are you not? This way you can adjust yourself better or give your therapist a call before it’s too late. Moreover, it feels nice to be actively involved in your treatment this way.

Using the PsyMate™ is easy: an app on your phone is all you need. Download the app now from the App Store or Play Store and discuss with your clinician how the two of you can get started with the PsyMate™.