Improving Student Mental Health Through Health Objectives in a Mobile App

This research sets out to validate a mobile app intervention that aimed to improve the participant’s mental health by asking them to engage in small daily challenges. The challenges encouraged the participant to create a better sleep, diet, and exercise routine, which in turn create better mental health. The challenges were gamified with points, badges, and leaderboards. The participants were split into two groups with the gamification features only shown to half of the participants to help measure the effect of gamification on the engagement. The study gathered 73 participants, of which 67 completed at least one challenge, 30 participated in multiple mental health surveys allowing us to calculate a change in mental health over time, and 8 completed the entire 8-week trial. Throughout the trial participants were asked to fill out a 4-item questionnaire to evaluate their mental health, while analytics were gathered about their engagement with the app as measured by the number of days they opened the app and number of points they collected. Correlation analyses were performed to measure the relationship between engagement and mental health and split by group. We observed a negative correlation between points gained and mental health score, as well as a difference in means between the control and experiment groups suggesting that engagement could be influenced by gamification and has a positive effect on mental health.