Researchers at the Feinberg School of Medicine have designed phone apps that aim to help users reduce depression and anxiety by interacting with the apps only a few times a day.

Kathryn Noth Tomasino, who co-authored a study that formed the basis of the apps, said the 13 IntelliCare apps addressed different aspects of users’ mental health through simple tasks.

“Different apps focus on different strategies, and people can pick and choose what works best for them,” she said. “All the apps are skills-based, and they focus on helping people do things. There’s not a lot of reading or content so it’s just practice of a lot of these different skills that we know to be effective when dealing with depression and anxiety.”

The apps are all different, but each is designed around the idea that the user should spend most of their time doing things outside of the app, like going for a walk or calling a friend. Tomasino said most users only looked at an app for about a minute at a time, but still found them to be effective.

Tomasino said one app, called “Thought Challenger,” lets users input specific thoughts they have and track patterns to form a plan to improve their mental health.

“You might think, ‘I never have any good days,’ if you’re depressed,” she said. “Your thinking might be really distorted in that way, so what Thought Challenger does it just has you enter that thought and then it walks you through step by step the process of coming up with a label for that pattern.”

The original study had about 100 participants and lasted eight weeks, Tomasino said. About 90 percent of the participants completed the eight-week trial of the apps, which are available on the Google Play store and are still being developed for iOS.

There was no control group for the study, so the apps still need to go through more testing, which is currently underway, Tomasino said. She added that she was pleased with the outcome of the first trial.

“What we saw was that depression and anxiety dropped by about 50 percent,” she said. “That’s equivalent to what we see with therapy and medication.”

Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @thejonahdylan