Clinical review of user engagement with mental health smartphone apps: evidence, theory and improvements
By John B. Torous, J. Nicholas, M. Larsen, J. Firth, Helen Christensen. Evidence Based Journals, 2018
700 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The potential of smartphone apps to improve quality and increase access to mental health care is increasingly clear. Yet even in the current global mental health crisis, real-world uptake of smartphone apps by clinics or consumers remains low. To understand this dichotomy, this paper reviews current challenges surrounding user engagement with mental health smartphone apps. While smartphone engagement metrics and reporting remains heterogeneous in the literature, focusing on themes offers a framework to identify underlying trends. These themes suggest that apps are not designed with service users in mind, do not solve problems users care most about, do not respect privacy, are not seen as trustworthy and are unhelpful in emergencies. Respecting these current issues surrounding mental health app engagement, we propose several solutions and highlight successful examples of mental health apps with high engagement. Further research is necessary to better characterise engagement with mental health apps and identify best practices for design, testing and implementation.
Subfields: Applied Psychology, General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ce7cd9833e3002b4db6544c8eb1881fd89a14f4d
How researchers see this paper
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In Applied Psychology
In Sociology and Political Science
- Lyle Ungar
- H. A. Schwartz
- Johannes C. Eichstaedt
- João Sedoc
- Robb Willer
- David B. Yaden
- Cameron Anderson
- Dacher Keltner
Citations in the corpus
- Large language models could change the future of behavioral healthcare: a proposal for responsible development and evaluation (2024, background): “However, these and other existing chatbots frequently struggle to understand and respond to unanticipated user responses 10,13 , which likely contributes to their low engagement and high dropout rates 14,15 .”
- Digital Mental Health Interventions for Depression, Anxiety, and Enhancement of Psychological Well-Being Among College Students: Systematic Review (2018, unknown): “Although this review focused on mental health apps [140], these themes appear to be translatable to reasons for poor engagement with other types of digital mental health interventions.”
- Remote patient monitoring using artificial intelligence: Current state, applications, and challenges (2023, background): “There is immense potential for AI to benefit healthcare service delivery and clinicians are exploring a variety of practical issues for assessing the risk of disease, ongoing patient care, and how AI can help clinicians to alleviate or reduce complications in illness progression (Torous et al., 2018”