Development of the Web App “Psychosocial Rehabilitation Project App”: Experience Report

Worldwide, there are few applications aimed at psychosocial rehabilitation, and none of them specifically address psychosocial rehabilitation projects. This justifies the need to build an application to assist mental health professionals in the construction and management of psychosocial rehabilitation projects in the Brazilian context. This investigation aimed to describe the development of the webapp "App Reabilita Psicossocial" through a technological development study conducted between May 2024 and February 2025. The webapp development process was carried out in 5 stages (theoretical foundation, requirements gathering, prototyping, and development), adapted from the Novak Method. With the active and collaborative participation of the principal researcher (psychiatric nurse) and two software engineering students, supervised by a software engineer and nursing professor, interactions occurred through video calls, WhatsApp, and email. These interactions were transcribed by the Transkriptor software and later inserted into the Atlas Ti software for thematic analysis. The webapp "App Reabilita Psicossocial" has an initial registration screen, and screens structured in the phases of the psychosocial rehabilitation project (assessment, diagnoses, goals, intervention, agreement, and evaluation), home, resources, and functions (add new/search project, and search for mental health support services) that facilitate its operation and streamline the construction of the psychosocial rehabilitation project by mental health professionals. The thematic analysis reflected 3 themes and 7 codes that describe the entire development process with interaction between participants in a collaborative and interrelational work. The collaborative approach between researchers and developers was crucial to translate the complexity of the psychosocial rehabilitation project into practical and usable functionalities for future users, the mental health professionals.