The development of a mindfulness-based mobile application to learn emotional self-regulation

The growing interest for mindfulness practices and the development of mobile applications market have ran together during the last decade, resulting in a large number of mindfulness-based applications, emotional help assistants, mood trackers and self-care/self-help mobile applications that have spread on the app stores. If the validity of mindfulness practices has been proved repeatedly in the last decades, there is also an emerging literature about mental health mobile applications’ efficacy. Since smartphones are already everyday life common devices, taking advantage of these tools and implement their usage in clinical practice can be a challenging opportunity for mental health improvement among people. This paper starts with an overview of the state of the art of mental health mobile applications, highlighting some possible guidelines to follow during the design of a mental health app. In the second part of this paper, it is described the design and development process of a mindfulness-based app that could provide helpful features to develop emotional self-regulation, in particular for people who have just concluded a mindfulness-based program (MBSR). In this second part of the paper are so described the emotional regulation theory which the app is based on, an overview of the several indicators of physical and psychological health to which mindfulness practices are significantly related to, and finally the way these concepts and guidelines have shaped the design of this mindfulnessbased application.