Advances in treatment of mental health by smartphone apps

Advances in treatment of mental health by smartphone apps

[Music] we’re with Dr John torus of Beth Israel deaconness Medical Center in the Harvard Medical School in Boston talking about smartphone apps for mental health so uh Dr Taurus for those who might not really know about smartphone apps um tell me a little bit about about them what are they exactly so there’s been a lot of interest in using smartphones and digital technology to augment Mental Health Services and what the reason there’s a great interest in smartphone apps is recently we’ve seen that these devices are more accessible and affordable to all people from all walks of life so it used to be the case that people with serious mental illness or any mental illness may have not had access to these Technologies but here and today most people I said not all have access to smartphones and these are very powerful digital devices they can record and take in a whole new they can record and take in much a lot of interesting information and they can also be useful treatment by extending our reach and type of services so looking at a lot of the ways that we diagnose and think about mental illnesses is we kind of recount of what our symptoms have been how we’ve been feeling but we have our phones on us at most times and it’s very easy to take surveys on the phone and record how are we feeling here and now there’s also a lot of new information our phones can pick up about say if we say we haven’t been very active we’ve been staying home our phones by virtue of being a phone know that the GPS is is recording that so there’s a lot of information on surveys that we can take in there’s a lot of information on the phone and that behavioral information as well of surveys of symptoms has the potential to be very useful in mental health okay now you talked about differences in the kind of data that are um developed or that are that are gathered by these apps and you talk about active data and passive data what’s an example of passive data what’s an example of active data y so let’s start with active data so active data would be something that you have to actively engage in so it be like you taking a survey or you giving a voice sample to the app passive data is a little bit different in being a phone the phone knows where you are the phone knows who you’ve called it may know certainly what websites you visited so passive data is data that the phone collects and being a phone that could be useful towards your Behavioral Health that could give us some signal of what you’re doing and how you’re doing it okay now um I know that there are many many of these out there I mean is there an estimate on how many of these mental health specific apps there are and then within that how many show some feasibility and how many actually demonstrate some sort of efficacy you know that’s a terrific question and no one’s actually counting how many mental health apps there are we think that there’s at least over 5,000 mental health apps or likely could be more and I say mental health focusing specifically on psychiatric conditions there’s many more Wellness apps out there but say there’s 5 th000 mental health apps there’s very little clinical data showing are these apps useful are they helpful are they dangerous perhaps about maybe 1% of all those apps out there have some clinical evidence or they’ve had a clinical study and if you look at what do those clinical studies tell us a lot of times they tell us it’s feasible we can collect this very interesting information very few to almost none I could probably count on my fingers apps actually have shown proven benefit to collect validated information or to give out validated treatment so I think we have a lot of apps out there we have very little evidence of what they’re doing for good or bad okay and how has the media done done in reporting on these do we tend to Hype them or we treat it neutrally you know I think a lot of times I said there’s cases of both good and bad I think we’ve seen a lot of cases where sometimes these apps can get overhyped I think borrowing from the field of looking at blood testing of Theos I think it was a case where media did a terrific job and help the scientific Community step back and say hey there’s actually nothing to this blood test company let’s see what you’re actually doing I think we’ve certainly seen cases where with Pokemon go we’ve seen perhaps too much excitement or that there’s an exciting new technology augmented reality that people can use but why what are the health benefits is really unknown so I think there’s a balance of like anything sometimes the coverage can be too much sometimes it can be too little okay now you were with the um the American Psychiatric association has a task force looking at these just briefly describe what’s your role what is it you’re trying to accomplish with that yeah so I’m the chair of the American Psychiatric task force that’s looking at how do we evaluate these apps and it’s a challenging question how to evaluate Health apps because they’re always changing you’ve probably SE your phone they update they change sometimes they disappear off the App Store Sometimes they come back so what we want to introduce is not a static rating that says this app is an A+ or 80 out of 100 we want to introduce a risk-based tool that will help clinicians and patients make the best informed decision so we’ll help people say what’s all information I should be looking at say what features of the privacy policy are most important how do I look at the risk data the benefit data the ease of use data and the data sharing and how do I put that together to make the best informed decision so we don’t know what app is right for you but we know that we can help give you the right information to make the an informed decision okay I think that’s all I need thank you very much sir thank you

Dr. John Torous is the co-director for the digital psychiatry program at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. He is also chair of the American Psychiatric Association Smartphone App Evaluation Task Force.