| Popis: |
BACKGROUND Engagement with mental health smartphone apps is an understudied, yet critical, construct to understand in the pursuit of more efficacious mental health apps. OBJECTIVE In this manuscript we examine engagement as a multidimensional construct, as well as strategies to enhance engagement for a novel app HabitWorks. HabitWorks delivers a personalized cognitive bias modification for interpretation bias intervention and was originally tested in people traversing the challenging transition from acute psychiatric care to daily life. METHODS Using a case series we evaluate three domains of engagement- behavioral, cognitive, and affective- for three HabitWorks participants. RESULTS This manuscript highlights various strategies to enhance engagement such as human support, personalization, self-monitoring, and privacy and security measures. Our cases illustrate the heterogeneity of engagement patterns and clinical outcomes. CONCLUSIONS With rich participant-level data we emphasize the necessity of studying engagement as a multifaceted construct, and the complexity of the relationship between overall engagement and psychosocial outcomes. Our thorough idiographic exploration of engagement with HabitWorks provides an example of how to optimize and operationalize engagement for other mHealth apps. |
