Significance
Despite the potential of highly tailored interventions to innervate
health improvements in people with M/SUDs, research to date has
overlooked personalization and typically applied personality to predict
behaviour (Chapman et al., 2014). By contrast, this study examines to
what extent mobile apps designed to detect and change trait
vulnerabilities in patients with M/SUDs can reduce drug cravings and
associated risk behaviours. Contribution to current research is likely
to be significant, as the project:
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will enable streamlined informed consent, prompt continued user
participation, and collect infinitely richer data sets (Jardine et
al., 2015)
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reflects a timely paradigm shift and recent calls for dimensional
trait models to help clinicians diagnose and treat mental illness
(Suzuki et al., 2015)
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may help foster a deeper understanding of how critical changes in
personality can impact recovery outcomes (Belcher et al., 2014)
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may help developers identify the responsive app determinants most
likely to elicit key trait and behavioural changes (Litvin et al.,
2013)
While the project’s size and focus on people with M/SUDs may limit
extrapolating findings across populations (i.e., the cohort effect), the
influence of the project is projected to have a wider impact.
Personalized mHealth apps are clearly not only relevant to groups
particularly vulnerable to M/SUDs such as KPs but also to the broader
social spectrum wishing to influence positive improvements to their
health.