Improving the Grow It! M-Health Tool: Examining the Role of Real-Time Personalized Feedback

Background: Studying the effects of mobile health (m-health) apps is crucial for providing accessible mental healthcare to people at high risk for psychopathology, such as adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, investigating elements such as real-time personalized feedback are essential to understand what underpins the effectiveness of m-health. The Grow It! app is a multiplayer serious gaming m-health app for adolescents aged 12 to 25 aimed at identification of emotional problems and improving well-being. This study aimed to improve suboptimal app activity (i.e., amount of experience sampling method questionnaires completed) by incorporating feedback in the form of an emotion overview chart into the app. Furthermore, this study wanted to investigate changes in affective and cognitive wellbeing and assess how users rate the emotion overview. Method: Adolescents (N = 143) played Grow It! for three weeks during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants filled in a...Show moreBackground: Studying the effects of mobile health (m-health) apps is crucial for providing accessible mental healthcare to people at high risk for psychopathology, such as adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, investigating elements such as real-time personalized feedback are essential to understand what underpins the effectiveness of m-health. The Grow It! app is a multiplayer serious gaming m-health app for adolescents aged 12 to 25 aimed at identification of emotional problems and improving well-being. This study aimed to improve suboptimal app activity (i.e., amount of experience sampling method questionnaires completed) by incorporating feedback in the form of an emotion overview chart into the app. Furthermore, this study wanted to investigate changes in affective and cognitive wellbeing and assess how users rate the emotion overview. Method: Adolescents (N = 143) played Grow It! for three weeks during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants filled in a questionnaire before and after playing the app, to measure differences in affective (measured on a 7-point Likert scale) and cognitive (measured on a 10-point Likert scale) well-being. The emotion overview was evaluated with four questions. Results: After conducting two paired samples t-tests, I found that affective well-being significantly increased by 0.29 points, t(142) = 3.30, p < .001 (one-tailed), d = .28. Forty percent (40%) of individuals experienced increases. Cognitive well-being significantly increased with 0.44 points, t(142) = 3.17, p < .001 (one-tailed), d = .27. Forty-nine percent (49%) of individuals experienced increases. After conducting a one-way ANOVA, I found that app activity was significantly higher for users playing Grow It! with the emotion overview included, F(2,1335) = 53.13, p < .001. User evaluations were overall positive with the emotion overview being a welcomed addition. Conclusion: The results of this study demonstrate successful replication of previous studies and support gamification theories on the usefulness of real-time personalized feedback. The addition of the emotion overview seems valuable for increasing app activity and positive app evaluations. Further research with a control group is recommended to be able to make any substantial claims on the effectiveness of Grow It! and what added value the emotion overview provides.Show less

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Improving the Grow It! M-Health Tool: Examining the Role of Real-Time Personalized Feedback