A digital symptom tracker for mental health and wellbeing is being created at Hunter Medical Research Institute.
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The tracker, named the MindPulse Project, would be similar to the successful FluTracker project - also created in the Hunter.
The web-based tool will collect data from people in Hunter New England, creating "real-time knowledge" about mental health.
It will also measure people's mental health during disasters such as bushfires, floods and heatwaves.
The tool will track local, national and international "environmental threat events", enabling researchers to "examine the intricate relationship between these events and mental wellbeing".
The project will pinpoint mental health hotspots, helping to direct services to areas in need.
Dara Sampson, co-director of HMRI's Healthy Minds Research Program, said "we'll encourage people to use the tracker weekly".
"The tool aims to allow people to track their mental wellbeing in less than a minute," Dr Sampson said.
"We don't want something too complex, but we want something that is reliable.
"It has to be snappy and something that people can engage with. We'll likely be using one of the World Health Organisation's wellbeing tools that only has four to five questions."
She added that it was an opportunity for people to be their own therapists and "have a sense of control over their wellbeing".
Frances Kay-Lambkin, HMRI's chief executive, said FluTracker provided "a pulse check on cold and flu symptoms" with a dashboard.
"During COVID it was critical in helping the state government understand where the COVID outbreaks were," Professor Kay-Lambkin said.
"We will fund a project to do the same thing, but for mental health."
She said the tracker's data would help "leverage resources".
"Imagine if we knew and could understand what the health and wellbeing was like for the people in our regional, rural and remote areas," she said.
"We have an opportunity to do that here. It's not been done anywhere else.
"I think that would be an important innovation for our region."
Dr Sampson said the tracker was "at the prototype stage".
The launch is planned for the second half of this year.
"We're consulting with people in the health district and a wide range of people from marginalised groups," Dr Sampson said.
This was helping to establish "what sorts of things we want to know about our community's wellbeing".
She said the online tool would link to the "eCliPSE" program, which was created by a team of researchers from the universities of Newcastle and Sydney and HMRI.
It's a free mental health program that helps address a lack of capacity in the health system and the rise in mental health and substance-use problems.
