Knowing What You're Doing or Knowing What to Do: How Stress Management Apps Support Reflection and Behaviour Change

摘要

Feelings of stress can have negative impacts on mental and physical health. In response, a significant number of stress management applications (apps) have been developed but little is known about their functionality. We conducted a feature analysis of 26 stress management and monitoring apps to identify required improvements. We found that the reviewed apps supported users with reflection, but did not include adequate functions to support action taking (i.e. initiating and maintaining behaviour change). This paper contributes a discussion of how to improve the design of stress management apps with examples of good practice and how healthcare providers can use this information to leverage such apps in clinical care.