ABSTRACT
Resilience, a person's mental ability to deal with challenging situations adaptively, is an important life skill. Supporting students in building psychological resilience and coping during crises (with the COVID-19 pandemic being a prime example) is crucial. Very few mobile applications (apps) for mental health explicitly report behavioral change techniques. Moreover, only a handful of the apps that support resilience are gamified, or use smartphone sensors readily available in modern smartphones for health self-management, or were designed for use by a nonclinical population. This study describes the design of a prototype for a gamified, theory-based mobile app that utilizes the Internet of Things to provide personalized data and enhance undergraduate students' resilience. A total of 74 participants evaluated the prototype and completed an online questionnaire during the COVID-19 lockdowns. The questionnaire included questions examining the design's feasibility for supporting resilience and questions on the System Usability Scale evaluating its usability. Regarding the evaluation of the prototype on improving psychological resilience, positive responses (M = 3.76 out of 5, SD = 0.82) were received for all functions (goal setting for studying, socializing and physical exercise, progress monitoring using sensors or self-reporting, reflection, motivational badges). The System Usability Scale returned an evaluation score of 72.9, indicating a satisfactory degree of usability. The resilience app is a promising proof of concept. Combining Internet of Things capabilities with active user interaction while incorporating behavior change techniques in a gamified environment was well accepted by students. Implications for the design of gamified environments for well-being are drawn. Future research will empirically validate its design using quasi-experimental methods.
ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION: Physical distancing (PD) is an important public health strategy to reduce the transmission of COVID-19 and has been promoted by public health authorities through social media. Although youth have a tendency to engage in high-risk behaviors that could facilitate COVID-19 transmission, there is limited research on the characteristics of PD messaging targeting this population on social media platforms with which youth frequently engage. This study examined social media posts created by Canadian public health entities (PHEs) with PD messaging aimed at youth and young adults aged 16-29 years and reported behavioral change techniques (BCTs) used in these posts. METHODS: A content analysis of all social media posts of Canadian PHEs from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube were conducted from April 1st to May 31st, 2020. Posts were classified as either implicitly or explicitly targeting youth and young adults. BCTs in social media posts were identified and classified based on Behavior Change Technique Taxonomy version 1 (BCTTv1). Frequency counts and proportions were used to describe the data. RESULTS: In total, 319 youth-targeted PD posts were identified. Over 43% of the posts originated from Ontario Regional public health units, and 36.4 and 32.6% of them were extracted from Twitter and Facebook, respectively. Only 5.3% of the total posts explicitly targeted youth. Explicit posts were most frequent from federal PHEs and posted on YouTube. Implicit posts elicited more interactions than explicit posts regardless of jurisdiction level or social media format. Three-quarters of the posts contained at least one BCT, with a greater portion of BCTs found within implicit posts (75%) than explicit posts (52.9%). The most common BCTs from explicit posts were instructions on how to perform a behavior (25.0%) and restructuring the social environment (18.8%). CONCLUSIONS: There is a need for more PD messaging that explicitly targets youth. BCTs should be used when designing posts to deliver public health messages and social media platforms should be selected depending on the target population.