Smartphones for Smarter Delivery of Mental Health Programs: A Systematic Review

By T. Donker, K. Petrie, Judith Proudfoot, Janine Clarke, Mary-Rose Birch, Helen Christensen. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 2013

1,101 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background The rapid growth in the use of mobile phone applications (apps) provides the opportunity to increase access to evidence-based mental health care. Objective Our goal was to systematically review the research evidence supporting the efficacy of mental health apps for mobile devices (such as smartphones and tablets) for all ages. Methods A comprehensive literature search (2008-2013) in MEDLINE, Embase, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, PsycINFO, PsycTESTS, Compendex, and Inspec was conducted. We included trials that examined the effects of mental health apps (for depression, anxiety, substance use, sleep disturbances, suicidal behavior, self-harm, psychotic disorders, eating disorders, stress, and gambling) delivered on mobile devices with a pre- to posttest design or compared with a control group. The control group could consist of wait list, treatment-as-usual, or another recognized treatment. Results In total, 5464 abstracts were identified. Of those, 8 papers describing 5 apps targeting depression, anxiety, and substance abuse met the inclusion criteria. Four apps provided support from a mental health professional. Results showed significant reductions in depression, stress, and substance use. Within-group and between-group intention-to-treat effect sizes ranged from 0.29-2.28 and 0.01-0.48 at posttest and follow-up, respectively. Conclusions Mental health apps have the potential to be effective and may significantly improve treatment accessibility. However, the majority of apps that are currently available lack scientific evidence about their efficacy. The public needs to be educated on how to identify the few evidence-based mental health apps available in the public domain to date. Further rigorous research is required to develop and test evidence-based programs. Given the small number of studies and participants included in this review, the high risk of bias, and unknown efficacy of long-term follow-up, current findings should be interpreted with caution, pending replication. Two of the 5 evidence-based mental health apps are currently commercially available in app stores.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, General Health Professions

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/41011b5572c9717b769c3c866cb2f4703eb53643

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In Applied Psychology

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In General Health Professions

Citations in the corpus

Computer-Delivered and Web-Based Interventions to Improve Depression, Anxiety, and Psychological Well-Being of University Students: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (2014, background): “A recent review of mental health apps for smartphones/tablets found only five apps that had been trialed [80], one of which was trialed on a student population [81].”
Trajectories of depression: unobtrusive monitoring of depressive states by means of smartphone mobility traces analysis (2015, background): “Several recent projects have investigated the potential use of mobile technologies for monitoring stress, depression and other mental disorders (see, for example, [25, 6, 31, 24, 36, 1, 5, 39], providing new ways for supporting both patients and healthcare ofﬁcers [8, 20].”
Systematic review of smartphone-based passive sensing for health and wellbeing (2017, background): “The sample size of most studies was acceptable for feasibility assessment but not to demonstrate clinical value, as others have noted about innovative health informatics research [27,75].”
Mental Health Smartphone Apps: Review and Evidence-Based Recommendations for Future Developments (2016, positive): “Some of these clinical diagnosis apps are known to be effective for interventions [8], but they do not capitalize on one of the major advantages of smartphones: high accessibility.”