Researchers at UMass Medical School and Worcester Polytechnic Institute have received a $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a smartphone app that will take a bite out of overeating caused by stress.
Development of the Re-lax app and a series of pilot clinical studies of 120 patients with obesity to evaluate the app's effectiveness will be led by Sherry Pagoto, associate professor in the Division of Preventive and Behavioral Medicine at UMass Medical School, and Bengisu Tulu, associate professor at the WPI Foisie School of Business.
"The app is different from others because it brings stress into the context of diet and exercise," Pagoto said. "My clinical and research experience shows that stress is a major reason people fail to follow through with lifestyle changes, which is what inspired this work."
Relax will entail both a mobile app that will enable patients to track their daily activities, and a web-based tool clinicians will be able to use to access patient information and help plan their treatment.
In addition to usual diet and exercise tracking, Pagoto said, the app also will help patients track both their stress and stress-induced eating and give them opportunities to do brief, relaxation exercises such as mindfulness meditation.
Using barcode scanning of foods, GPS technology and patients' text inputs, Relax will track their daily activities, eating patterns, exercise, mood and stress-inducing events, and provide them with an itemized list of the foods they ate and the times of day that were most stressful, illustrating the relationship between the two,
Data will be uploaded to a cloud-based platform to give clinicians guidance about when patients are experiencing stress and emotional eating, what foods they eat at those times and how often they do relaxation exercises — all information that clinicians during traditional weight-loss counseling sessions have to spend time soliciting from patients or gleaning from records.
By using the Relax web tool, clinicians will be able to more quickly get to the core of what's causing patients' eating habits, resulting in better outcomes with fewer visits to their doctors or counselors, Tulu said.
"We think that if you can shorten the time counseling takes," she said, "the money you save can be used to reach more patients."
The three-year project will track 120 patients to determine the app's effectiveness.
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