Kota KODAMA, Ph.D.

Mobile health (mHealth) is a technology to share information obtained through smartphones and wearable devices with cloud servers and medical institutions to monitor consumers and maintain their health status. Based on my most recent research, a mainstream research trend for mobile health in the future is to focus on mental health. In recent years, the high suicide rate due to depression has become a severe social problem in Japan, especially among young people. It is causing severe economic losses in the country. Since patients with major depression are usually said to have lower health status than the general population, detecting changes in physical information of depressed patients through mHealth can provide reference information to medical professionals and enable real-time tracking of patients. Thus, mHealth is expected to be a technology that can solve serious social problems in the mental health domain. However, for mHealth to create value in this area, it is necessary to consider technological innovation and the impact of regulations and differences in social and cultural environments in different regions. Therefore, I aim to contribute to the sound development and utilization of mHealth by examining beneficial social systems in my doctoral program.