A unique asthma management and goals app is the latest innovative tool to assist young people with asthma improve their quality of life.

The free Kiss MyAsthma app, launched on World Asthma Day, is designed to help the 11 per cent of young Australians with asthma manage the physical, social and emotional impacts of the condition.

Asthma Australia funded the app, which was developed by a team of researchers, clinicians and app developers led by the University of Sydney and the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research.

The app is believed to be the first asthma app co-designed with a group of young people with asthma, right from the beginning of the design process. It’s also the first app to address the self-management and psychological issues linked to asthma.

Kiss MyAsthma enables young people with asthma to outline their asthma management and goals. It sends notifications from a cast of monster characters that provide friendly reminders and opportunities to adjust their goals to keep them on-track.

The app also features symptom and mood tracking, emergency support, diarises asthma attacks, and enables young people to share their tracked data with health practitioners.

It comes after a 2014 survey of more than 500 people aged 12 to 25 with asthma found 63 per cent had poorly controlled asthma, 52 per cent were likely to experience mental health issues, while 56 per cent revealed asthma affected their enjoyment of life.

Research conducted as part of the app development process, recently published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, highlighted the importance of mental health support for young people with asthma.

Associate Professor Lorraine Smith, a research psychologist at the University of Sydney and lead investigator on the app project, said workshop activities with the co-designers highlighted the importance of mental health issues and broader psychological issues for young people living with asthma.

“The guiding principle that we had for this project was that we wanted to develop an app for young people that was developed by young people from the very beginning of the design process, and not from the perspective of a whole bunch of researchers, who think they know better and usually they don’t,” she said.

“Through those workshops, we got to know what was important for them, what a typical day looked like, what their challenges were in their life, what role asthma played in their life.”

Researchers applied psychological principles, including autonomy, relatedness and competence, to the information gathered at the workshops to help create a range of features within the app.

“Having medication alerts/reminders on your app to use your preventer or your reliever, being able to log your medical history or your list of medications - that’s going to help support their sense of competence around managing their condition,” she said.

“Being able to show their reports to their doctors - the history of your flare ups, what the symptoms were, how severe they were, that all contributes to their growing sense of autonomy and personal control but also their sense of competence.”

The app development team hopes to be able to add extra features to the app, such as in-app chat, to enable young people to share their experiences of asthma with others who also live with the condition.

Associate Professor Smith said the app is a resource health practitioners can tap into - and use with their patients.

“It provides a fantastic conversation starter for health professionals who have a very difficult task ahead of them, which is being able to engage young people with asthma,” she said.