Addiction Application Gradebook: Fostering greater public health impact from mHealth applications for SUD

About This Grant

Project Summary Recent estimates show 85% of United States adults own a smartphone and 56.6% report using a mobile health application in the past year. Mobile health applications targeting substance use and use disorder can fill numerous treatment gaps, such as providing broader access, enhanced flexibility, and opportunity for individual self-determination. At the same time, app quality is variable, poorly understood, and both academic and commercial developers are flooding the marketplace. The proposed Phase One STTR project will establish foundation research and development for the Addiction Application Gradebook, a web platform dedicated to the description, evaluation, and market assessment of smartphone- and web-based applications for substance use disorder (SUD) information/prevention, harm reduction, treatment, and recovery. While increased availability of mobile apps for SUD is an important step forward, rapid growth coupled with the absence of an infrastructure for organizing, evaluating, and tracking these products has resulted in a large and difficult to navigate landscape. Therefore, the Phase One aims of this proposal are to conduct research and development in three key areas related to SUD app 1) Identification, 2) Evaluation, and 3) Tracking to yield a minimum viable product design that would set the stage for Phase Two development, testing, and commercialization. The proposed project outlines clear and measurable milestones for success that include a procedure for ongoing app identification, assembling an expert Delphi panel, and creating a novel SUD app evaluation framework as well as a model for understanding the SUD app innovation pipeline. The culmination of project milestones will be foundation data for a web platform with functionality for no cost public education (i.e., the public can search and find the right app for a given SUD need) and commercialization via a business-to-business membership model (i.e., app developers, employee assistance contractors, mHealth investors and scientific funders can obtain market assessments, product comparisons, and innovation trajectory analytics). The proposed project is well aligned with NIDA Strategic Priorities, particularly Areas 2 and 5 related to prevention, treatment, harm reduction, recovery, and scientific innovation translation. The Addiction Application Gradebook can fill several needs in a rapidly growing mHealth market valued at 93 billion dollars in 2023. There is currently no comparable product while there is commercial potential for the general business model we propose (i.e., app selection, market research, and analytics). Phase One is focused on building the platform scientific base; in Phase Two we will prioritize web-design, incorporation of artificial intelligence capabilities, and commercialization.