Two Minds Blog

  Mental health is a popular topic for smartphone apps, with as many as 20 thousand  apps of varying quality on the market. Mental or behavioral health is a broad category, including everything from live online therapy sessions, to coaching and meditation apps, to habit trackers, step counters, and productivity tools. The COVID-19 pandemic increased public attention to mental health, generating even more interest in these tools. But which ones are best? This post will square off several interesting apps against one another. I'll note up front that my list doesn't include any (a) apps like BetterHelp or Talkspace that let the user connect with a live therapist , or (b) apps that include direct biofeedback from a sensor like the MUSE Monitor EEG headband or HeartMath HRV sensor (but see a different post about that type of sensor-integrated app here ). Mental and behavioral health smartphone apps seem to fall into several broad categories, offering different types of support: Ca...

  How do people use data to make decisions? In a new study with Dr. Laurel Messer and colleagues, we explored the use of continuous glucose monitors (CGM) by adolescents with type 1 diabetes. The study is based on the idea of situational awareness as a predictor of successful self-management.  Some of the obvious ways in which people might use data are as an immediate check on their current blood sugar, or as a tool to watch patterns of change in their personal blood sugar data over the course of a day. Perhaps contrary to what one might expect, neither the length of time since a person's last glucose check or the total number of times that they checked their blood sugar during the day predicted whether they were able to successfully manage their diabetes. (Successful control was based on a widely-accepted "time in range" or TIR measure of blood sugar over the course of the day). In fact, the more often  someone looked at their CGM device, the worse  their diabetes...