Detect-S: an mHealth application to assist health professionals to identify suicide risk in hospitalized patients

Suicide is a serious public health problem that affects the whole world. This study describes development of the prototype for an mHealth application (app) intended to assist healthcare professionals to identify suicide risk in hospitalized patients and reports on testing of the app by some of these professionals, conducted to confirm its functionality.

This is applied exploratory research into use of Information Technology within the healthcare field, based on application prototyping for mobile devices. The research was conducted at the Universidade Federal de Ciências da Saúde de Porto Alegre (UFCSPA) from 2017 to 2019. Six healthcare professionals, one data scientist, and three undergraduate students in Biomedical Informatics took part in the study. All research participants signed the free and informed consent form.

The main findings show that the development team created a prototype named Detect-S, which became a cross-platform application (iOS and Android) offering 16 functions.

It can be concluded that Detect-S has the potential to be a positive technological instrument that can be tested in a hospital setting to assist healthcare professionals to identify and manage patients with at risk of suicide.