Abstract
BackgroundE-mental healthcare is the convergence of digital technologies with mental health services. It has been developed to fill a gap in healthcare for people who need mental wellbeing support that may not otherwise receive psychological treatment. With an increasing number of e-mental healthcare and research, this study aimed to investigate the trends of an e-mental health research field that integrates interdisciplinary fields and to examine the information technologies is being used in mental healthcare. To achieve the research objectives, bibliometric analysis, information extraction, and network analysis were applied to analyze e-mental health research data.MethodsE-mental health research data were obtained from 3663 bibliographic records from the Web of Science (WoS) and 3172 full-text articles from PubMed Central (PMC). The text mining techniques used for this study included bibliometric analysis, information extraction, and visualization.ResultsThe e-mental health research topic trends primarily involved e-health care services and medical informatics research. The clusters of research comprised 16 clusters, which refer to mental sickness, e-health, diseases, information technology (IT), and self-management. The information extraction analysis revealed a triple relation with IT and biomedical domains. Betweenness centrality was used as a measure of network graph centrality, based on the shortest path to rank the important entities and triple relation; nodes with higher betweenness centrality had greater control over the network because more information passes through that node. The IT entity-relations of “mobile” had the highest score at 0.043466. The top pairs were related to depression, mobile health, and text message.ConclusionsE-mental related publications were associated with various research fields, such as nursing, psychology, medical informatics, computer science, telecommunication, and healthcare innovation. We found that trends in e-mental health research are continually rising. These trends were related to the internet of things (IoT) and mobile applications (Apps), which were applied for mental healthcare services. Moreover, producing AI and machine learning for e-mental healthcare were being studied. This work supports the appropriate approaches and methods of e-mental health research that can help the researcher to identify important themes and choose the best fit with their own survey work.
Highlights
E-mental healthcare is the convergence of digital technologies with mental health services
We investigated the e-mental health research topics between 2015 and 2019 and found that the trends were associated with various research fields, such as nursing, psychology, medical informatics, computer science, telecommunication, and healthcare innovation
This paper utilized bibliometric and information extraction methods to report on the landscape of the e-mental health research field and the use of information technology (IT) for mental health treatments
Summary
E-mental healthcare is the convergence of digital technologies with mental health services. It has been developed to fill a gap in healthcare for people who need mental wellbeing support that may not otherwise receive psychological treatment. The demand for mental health services has been growing globally in recent years. Mental health conditions arise as a result of genetic factors, life circumstances, and other illnesses. This is especially prevalent in people with. Mental health service resources have not been progressing to meet the growing demand. This has led to pressure on service capacity [3, 4], resulting in longer waiting times for people in need of support. There are extensive gaps between service engagement and treatment, which is reflected in the high number of people who never receive any treatment
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