Title: Smartphone Mental Health Interventions for Anxiety and Depression

Abstract:

Background: Anxiety and depression are common (prevalence of 18% to 21%) in UK young people [1]. Insomnia (difficulty sleeping, staying asleep) is associated with the onset of mental health problems [2]. Automated insomnia treatment is effective for mental health symptoms. The onset of insomnia symptoms could therefore be used to identify and treat those with early onset mental health problems in a public health intervention to improve treatment for young adults.

Method: Patient participation involvement (PPI)- We conducted two focus groups to discuss the acceptability of running a mobile app in the background to study sleeping patterns as well as the acceptability of the app design and ease of the registration process. The young people told us that having a mobile app to be run in the background without user intervention would be good and more acceptable to them than an app that required regular user intervention. Moreover, regarding the design and registration process of the app the group found it was easy and user friendly to register in the app.

Base on this design we have created a sleep-tracking app (Sleep Tracker) for Android smartphones. The app uses the phone on/off time to identify when a young person wakes up/goes to sleep. We conducted two field tests with a total of 13 participants to test the app. The aim of these tests was to check the accuracy of the algorithms in calculating sleep duration. During the study period over 17 nights (10 nights in field test 1 and 7 nights in field test 2) we asked the participants to submit sleep diaries. The diary was used to collect data related to their sleep duration, whether they were awake at night without using the phone or if they woke up in the morning without checking their phones and later compared with the Sleep Tracker app data.

Biography:

Doaa Alamoudi is currently a third-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science (Digital Health) and under the supervision of Prof Nabney and Prof Crawley. Doa'a undertakes research in providing early intervention in mental health for young adults