CBT Assistant: MHealth App for psychotherapy

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is psychotherapy recommended for mental disorders such as Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) and depression. Wide base of evidence across different studies and clinical practices shows the effectiveness and safety of CBT as compared to other types of treatment. After a face-to-face session with therapists, patients would typically carry out Homework, a central concept to CBT. Patients fill in their worksheets or diaries using pen-and-paper forms between two consecutive face-face sessions with the therapist. Homework provides crucial information about patients to the therapist. In this paper, we discuss mobile support for the delivery of CBT interventions in general, and present an Android app called CBT Assistant that supports behavioral interventions for patients suffering from SAD. CBT Assistant, highly adaptable to the specific context of a given patient. is designed for both therapists and patients, CBT Assistant provides active support for end-to-end CBT protocol including identification of stress or situations that trigger mental problems, assessing their severity, recording and then analyzing the patient's inputs. We believe that CBT Assistant can improve the efficacy of the therapy, and makes the delivery of CBT less taxing for both the therapist and patient. CBT Assistant is designed with input from technologists and therapists. It will be evaluated first by healthy subjects and then by patients receiving CBT at the National University Hospital.