How Mobile Technology can Fill in the Gaps between Therapy Sessions

The Internet seems to be the solution to everything: education, entertainment, socializing, even healthcare. It’s the self-help book that’s updated every millisecond, feeding us with more information than we could possibly absorb from every angle that we can imagine. But can it be a substitute for mental health therapy?

            As a therapist, you know that a generalized article posted online and a few nifty smartphone apps can’t replace the one-on-one care that you provide. As far along as we may be in our technological advancement, the average Joe doesn’t have access to the level of artificial intelligence you’ve seen in “Her,” where he can develop a complete relationship with a computerized system. New research (Source) has, however, suggested that people might be more comfortable disclosing emotional matters to their screens than they are to another person. Even a Skype session with a therapist can be more fruitful (Source)—in some cases—than a face-to-face visit

 But perhaps the most interesting aspect of this research is that people exhibited more honest self-disclosure when they weren’t communicating with someone in real-time. Since the subjects of the study knew that researchers were going to be monitoring their responses later, you would think that they would share as openly as though they were sharing directly with another person, right? Not so—just the temporary distance was enough to give the subjects a sense of greater privacy. But as a therapist who knows firsthand the value of in-person mental health treatment, how can you use this information to improve your therapy practice?

SelfEcho's Mobile Therapy product is a real-time patient monitoring system that allows you to fill in the knowledge-gaps between sessions with the in-the-moment honesty your patients can express on the comfortable platform of their smartphone. Throughout the day, the Mobile Therapy app will send them customizable reminders to take note of the information that will be useful to you, such as how they’re feeling at the time given their surroundings and activities. The app will also run in the background, picking up on certain data passively. This data will then be tracked and communicated with you through the friendly interface of your own Self Echo Dashboard so that you can empirically monitor the efficacy of your treatments.

In short, maybe your patients can be more honest when they aren’t with you, but now, you can use that to help you both.