Bringing parents and teens together to support mental health
Digital approaches, such as apps, are potentially powerful tools to help engage teenagers with their health. However, research consistently shows it can be extremely difficult to encourage people to use health apps more than one or two times.
The Triple E Project, led in a collaboration between the Matilda Centre and the University of Newcastle, aims to address this challenge.
By working with teenagers and their parents, they’re testing strategies to encourage teens to monitor and learn more about health behaviours that affect their long term mental and physical health, through a healthy lifestyles app.
The app aims to change six behaviours, including:
- Reduction of recreational screen time
- Increased physical activity
- Healthy sleep
- Healthy food
- Reduced alcohol use
- Reduced tobacco use
We joined Project Lead Dr Louise Thornton to discuss the project and what she hopes to see from young people working with apps to improve their health.
Tell us about how Triple E started.
The Triple E project came as an offshoot of the Health4Life program, a wellbeing initiative for adolescents to engage with six key behaviours that affect their physical and mental health. The intervention started in schools for students to work on during class, but we recognised a need for continued support at the end of the school day, so we envisioned a way for students to receive support through a smartphone app.
The Health4Life app was designed to make the most of key behaviour change strategies like tracking progress and receiving feedback on health behaviours and mood. As part of the program, there’s also a booster support pathway for people who might be at high risk of chronic disease.
When we got unexpected results from app usage, where only 15% of students accessed the app, we started the Triple E project to look at what was going on, and where we could improve engagement with the Health4Life app. We know that the health behaviour change strategies are potentially really powerful, so we want to work with young people to find the best way to help them engage with these strategies.
What is the value of app-based content over other forms, such as a website?
We went with an app mostly for ease of access. There’s an ever-growing number of young people who have smartphones, so having an app that they can check in on throughout the day and have notifications to remind them of the activities makes sense.
Why is it so important to address health behaviours among teenagers?
Recent research has shown that the six modifiable behaviours targeted by the Triple E app are associated with the development of a range of chronic diseases later in life and are some of the leading causes of death. Preventing things like heart disease and cancer should start as early as possible.
It’s so much harder to change a habit once we’ve started and it’s become established, so we hope that by helping young people build healthy habits through adolescence they will carry them through to adulthood.
What would you like to see as an outcome of this project?
I’d love the project to be able to generate recommendations and guidelines for engaging young people with various e-health approaches. We hope that the findings around what works with the Triple E app can be taken and generalised to other apps and digital health approaches that in the long run can increase adolescent engagement in safe, effective and evidence-based programs for their health.
Are you 13-17 or know someone who is 13-17 who would appreciate using an app to help manage their physical and mental health? Join the Triple E study today!