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The sober app could help alcohol addiction treatment (2014-03-28)

University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have developed a smartphone application they have shown can be effective in treating people who struggle with addiction.

 


 

A team in the Center for Health Enhancement System Studies led by David Gustafson, a UW-Madison professor of industrial and systems engineering, created the app to help patients with alcohol use disorders. The results of the team's study were published March 26, 2014, in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

The app, the Addiction-Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support System (A-CHESS), was designed to provide continuing, personalized support to people recovering from alcoholism.

The A-CHESS app has various features that provide this support—for example, it provides access to peer-to-peer messaging and discussion forums among A-CHESS users, offers guided-relaxation audio, and gives users the ability to video-chat with counselors. The app also discourages users from responding to triggers. For example, the GPS system in the smartphone can detect when a patient nears a high-risk location (a bar she used to frequent) and sends an alert asking the patient if she wants to be there.

The JAMA Psychiatry paper outlines the results of a randomized study of 349 patients with alcohol use disorders, in which roughly half used the A-CHESS smartphone app in addition to treatment as usual. The study found that not only did the A-CHESS app users report fewer risky drinking days (days in which drinking exceeded four standard drinks for men and three for women in a two-hour period), but also that smartphone app users had a higher likelihood of consistent abstinence from alcohol.

For more information
The UW-Madison College of Engineering

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