Objectives: Despite the proliferation of mobile mental health apps, evidence of their efficacy around anxiety or depression is inadequate as most studies lack appropriate control groups. Given that apps are designed to be scalable and reusable tools, insights concerning their efficacy can also be assessed uniquely through comparing different implementations of the same app. This exploratory analysis investigates the potential to report a preliminary effect size of an open-source smartphone mental health app, mindLAMP, on the reduction of anxiety and depression symptoms by comparing a control implementation of the app focused on self-assessment to an intervention implementation of the same app focused on CBT skills.
Methods: A total of 328 participants were eligible and completed the study under the control implementation and 156 completed the study under the intervention implementation of the mindLAMP app. Both use cases offered access to the same in-app self-assessments and therapeutic interventions. Multiple imputations were utilized to impute the missing Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 and Patient Health Questionnaire-9 survey scores of the control implementation.
Results: Post hoc analysis revealed small effect sizes of Hedge's g = 0.34 for Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 and Hedge's g = 0.21 for Patient Health Questionnaire-9 between the two groups.
Conclusions: mindLAMP shows promising results in improving anxiety and depression outcomes in participants. Though our results mirror the current literature in assessing mental health apps' efficacy, they remain preliminary and will be used to inform a larger, well-powered study to further elucidate the efficacy of mindLAMP.
Keywords: Smartphone; anxiety; app; depression; digital; effect.
© The Author(s) 2023.