What is your background and role within your organisation?
I am a clinical psychologist working at the cross over between physical and mental health with specialist research training. So I spend my time developing and testing new interventions to improve mental health and delivering psychological therapies in clinical practice.
Where did you hear about & why did you want to use Flo?
In the least likely way! I happened to be at a presentation where someone was talking about how Flo was used to monitor blood pressure and other health measurements. Through a bit of thought and a very helpful collaboration between some patient advisors, clinicians, and the people at Simple, we realised that the technology could be adapted to support engagement with psychological therapies.
What did you set out to achieve with Flo and how did you go about it?
Although several psychological therapies are clinically effective, many people who seek help do not experience as much benefit as they could. Part of the reason for this is that psychological therapies can be hard going and sometimes people stop before they have got the most out of it. This is especially true for group psychological therapies for people who have long-term health problems. So we wanted to see if Flo could help people with cancer to get the most from an evidence-based group psychological therapy called Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT).
MBCT teaches participants a range of ways to be present to the moment, which can help reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression as well as reducing risk of future problems. However, MBCT involves around 45 minutes of home practice each day between sessions, which many people find a challenging task.
We developed a way of giving patients tailored messages about the group theme each week and reminders of the home practice, so that they could engage as much or as little with it as they wished including personalised content specific to the group.
In a separate project we
tested whether Flo could help people stay well for longer after psychological therapy by asking participants to imagine that they could send text messages to themselves in the future. We asked patients what advice they would give themselves from what they learnt in therapy if they were 1) doing well 2) experiencing early warning signs of relapse or 3) experiencing full relapse. We then fed these messages into Flo and asked patients to rate their wellbeing 0 to 5 each week, with 5 being the best and 0 being the worst. In response
they received a message of their own advice tailored to their level of wellbeing.
Were there any surprises?
We were surprised by the size of the effect on dropout. When we compared the group of patients who used Flo during their group with those who did not,
Flo users were much more likely to complete the programme than those who did not. In fact,
the odds of completing MBCT were eight times greater for patients using Flo compared with non‐users. In addition,
Flo users experienced 50% more improvement in symptoms of depression than non-users.