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Designing a Scalable, Accessible, and Effective Mobile App Based Solution for Common Mental Health Problems

ABSTRACT The need for treatment of common mental health problems such as depression or anxiety has steadily increased. However, many people still do not receive effective and timely treatment due to the low availability, accessibility, and acceptability of traditional counseling. In this study, we developed a scalable, effective, and accessible app to address the problems that arise in traditional face-to-face counseling and to treat common psychological problems such as mild depression that people experience in their daily lives. The suggested app features semi-crowdsourced counseling, immediate intervention from multiple counselors, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)-based short comments, and gamification. In a two-week randomized control trial (RCT), we surveyed 47 college students in their 20 s to investigate the efficacy of the suggested app and found that depression levels were reduced significantly only in the experimental group using the app. In addition, we conducted a user survey to determine which design factors affected the user experience of clients and counselors using the app. The proposed app can be used to help those suffering from mild depression in daily life, and it can also be used as a training aid to enhance counselors’ counseling skills.