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With a grant from the Department of Defense, Military Suicide Research Consortium, Dr. Brenner and her team are evaluating the efficacy of an upstream suicide prevention intervention in which phone applications are used to evaluate individuals' behaviors, mood, and symptoms. In the study, participants are randomized to either a) the experimental arm, which uses a phone app to gather behavioral information from voice recordings and mobile phone usage that is used to identify risk, or b) the active control arm where participants use MyCap to complete biweekly mental health surveys and access mental health resources via Links.
Dr. Brenner and her team chose MyCap because of its integration with REDCap. Dr. Brenner says, “We could not find another app that was comparable”. Her study team, who is already familiar with REDCap, was particularly interested in the interface between MyCap and REDCap to administer and track participant responses. Additionally, by tracking upcoming and completed tasks, MyCap helped reduce participant and research team member burden: Participants can identify what they need to complete, and the research team spends less time monitoring completion rates. The app's push notifications have also been helpful in reducing email fatigue that comes with manual reminders.
When asked about ways MyCap can improve, Dr. Brenner suggested an improvement to the in-app notification to help participants more easily identify the dates of overdue tasks (when retrospective data collection is allowed). Dr. Brenner is also looking forward to using the new Dynamic Links feature to streamline the onboarding of remote participants, especially those without two devices as they struggled to join with QR codes.
Thank you, Dr. Brenner, for sharing your use case and feedback with us!
This work is in part supported by the Military Suicide Research Consortium (MSRC), funded by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs under Award No. (W81XWH-16-2-0004). Opinions, interpretations, conclusions and recommendations are those of the author and are not necessarily endorsed by the MSRC or the Department of Defense.
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