PHIT for Duty, a Mobile Application for Stress Reduction, Sleep Improvement, and Alcohol Moderation.

Post-traumatic stress and other problems often occur after combat, deployment, and other military operations. Because techniques such as mindfulness meditation show efficacy in improving mental health, our team developed a mobile application (app) for individuals in the armed forces with subclinical psychological problems as secondary prevention of more significant disease. Based on the Personal Health Intervention Toolkit (PHIT), a mobile app framework for personalized health intervention studies, PHIT for Duty integrates mindfulness-based relaxation, behavioral education in sleep quality and alcohol use, and psychometric and psychophysiological data capture. We evaluated PHIT for Duty in usability and health assessment studies to establish app quality for use in health research. Participants (N = 31) rated usability on a 1 (very hard) to 5 (very easy) scale and also completed the System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire (N = 9). Results were (mean ± SD) overall (4.5 ± 0.6), self-report instruments (4.5 ± 0.7), pulse sensor (3.7 ± 1.2), sleep monitor (4.4 ± 0.7), sleep monitor comfort (3.7 ± 1.1), and wrist actigraphy comfort (2.7 ± 0.9). The average SUS score was 85 ± 12, indicating a rank of 95%. A comparison of PHIT-based assessments to traditional paper forms demonstrated a high overall correlation (r = 0.87). These evaluations of usability, health assessment accuracy, physiological sensing, system acceptability, and overall functionality have shown positive results and affirmation for using the PHIT framework and PHIT for Duty application in mobile health research.

A personal health information toolkit for health intervention research.

With the emergence of mobile health (mHealth) apps, there is a growing demand for better tools for developing and evaluating mobile health interventions. Recently we developed the Personal Health Intervention Toolkit (PHIT), a software framework which eases app implementation and facilitates scientific evaluation. PHIT integrates self-report and physiological sensor instruments, evidence-based advisor logic, and self-help interventions such as meditation, health education, and cognitive behavior change. PHIT can be used to facilitate research, interventions for chronic diseases, risky behaviors, sleep, medication adherence, environmental monitoring, momentary data collection health screening, and clinical decision support. In a series of usability evaluations, participants reported an overall usability score of 4.5 on a 1-5 Likert scale and an 85 score on the System Usability Scale, indicating a high percentile rank of 95%.