NCT03972293

2018 Intern Health Study Micro-randomized Trial

2018 Intern Health Study Micro-randomized Trial: Developing a Mobile Health App to Improve Mental Health and Maintain Healthy Behaviors During the Internship Year

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 2,134 (actual)
• Sponsor: University of Michigan · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: —
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

The aim of this trial is to evaluate the efficacy of an intervention (delivered through a smartphone) for improving the mood, physical activity, and sleep of medical interns.

Detailed description

Due to their high stress workloads, medical interns suffer from depression at higher rates than the general population. Interns also tend to have lower sleep and decreased physical activity. The goal of this trial is to evaluate the efficacy of a mobile health intervention intending to help improve the mental health of medical interns. The intervention sends mobile phone notifications which aim to help interns improve their mood, maintain physical activity, and obtain adequate sleep during their internship year. The primary aim of the study is to evaluate how notifications affect participants' weekly mood, as measured through a daily one question mood survey. The second primary aim of the study is to evaluate how notifications affect participants' long-term mental health, as measured by the Patient Health Questionnaire. The first secondary aim is to evaluate how mood notifications affect participants' weekly mood. The second secondary aim is to evaluate how activity notifications affect participants' weekly step count. The third secondary aim is to evaluate how sleep notifications affect participants' weekly sleep duration. In order to better optimize notification delivery, the final aim (exploratory) is to understand moderators of these effects. Moderators of interest are previous week's mood, previous week's step count, previous week's sleep duration, study week, sex, previous history of depression, and baseline neuroticism.

Conditions

• Depression
• Mood
• Sleep
• Physical Activity

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Intern Health Study behavioral change mobile notification	The study's mobile app will be used to deliver intervention notifications. The intervention notifications appear on the participant's phone lock screen. The notifications have 3 categories: mood notifications, activity notifications, sleep notifications. Mood notifications aim to increase the participant's mood. Activity notifications aim to increase the participant's physical activity. Sleep notifications aim to increase the participant's sleep duration. To increase the category of interest, the notifications use two types of messages: life insights and tips. Life insights provide participants information on their historical data (for a given category) in order to help them self-monitor. Tips are non-data based notifications which provide general advice for improving the category of interest.
BEHAVIORAL	Intern Health Study mobile app	The Intern Health Study mobile app is able to conduct a daily mood survey. It also aggregates and visualizes historical data on intern mood, activity, and sleep.

Timeline

• Start date: 2018-04-01
• Primary completion: 2019-07-01
• Completion: 2019-07-01
• First posted: 2019-06-03
• Last updated: 2019-08-13

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States