Army Names App WinnersArmy Names App Winners

Applications to monitor psychological health, aid disaster-relief efforts and develop a personal-training program are among the ones the Army has picked as winners of its first internal app-development challenge.

The military agency is expected to honor the top five winners of its Apps for the Army challenge on Thursday at the LandWarNet Conference in Tampa, Florida.

The Army launched the contest in March, giving soldiers and Army civilians -- either in teams or individually -- 75 days to develop applications to help the Army's mission.

The contest marked a shift in the agency's traditional application-development practices, focusing instead on agile development and rapid deployment.

The Army provided developers with resources -- including cross-platform, cloud-based and secure development environments -- to help them build competing applications.

The winners out of 53 submitted applications include both web-based and mobile applications, and the Army awarded top winners in each of five categories $3,000 for first place, $1,500 for second place and $1,000 for third place.

The top five winners covered applications for personal training, navigation, psychological health, disaster relief and recruitment. All but one used the Google's Android mobile OS either solely or in part as the basis for the applications.

One mobile application called the Telehealth Mood Tracker, which in addition to Android was built for Apple's iPhone iOS, allows people to track their psychological health over a period of days, weeks and months using a visual rating scale.

Another based solely on Android offers a web-based tool for searching, editing and creating maps on Google Earth and Google Map. The maps are meant to assist Army personnel working in humanitarian relief and civilian affairs operations, according to the army.

Yet another winner -- this one based solely on iOS -- helps soldiers develop a personally tailored training program based on the Army's new Physical Readiness Training program. The app provides training plans and exercise videos.

A list of all 25 winners can be found online.

The winning applications will be available for holders of Department of Defense Common Access Cards through the DoD Application Storefront beginning Tuesday.