With the help of a science-based smartphone app, psychotherapists and psychologists can now enhance their patients' treatment with interventions and assessments in everyday life. By bridging the gap between the treatment room and the patient's real life, therapy becomes more efficient and effective. That is the mission of m-Path Software, a new spin-off of KU Leuven.
Just over one in five Flemish adults meet the criteria for a mental disorder. This was revealed just last year by the Public Mental Health Monitor (research report in Dutch), a large-scale interuniversity study in Flanders. Those who take the step to seek help in most cases have to wait about three months before a psychologist or psychotherapist can start a course of treatment. "On top of that, once a therapy is started, it still doesn't take place where according to research, it can have the most effect: namely in everyday life", says Merijn Mestdagh. As a former KU Leuven researcher, he is today co-founder of the spin-off m-Path Software, which aims to solve exactly that problem.
Speaking and smartphone
m-Path Software is a spin-off of the Quantitative Psychology and Individual Differences research group of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at KU Leuven. Founded by researchers Merijn Mestdagh, Stijn Verdonck and Egon Dejonckheere, the young company helps therapists to continue their treatment outside their consulting room, in the patient's real life.
"With our blended care platform called 'm-Path' - a smartphone app - psychologists and psychotherapists can complement their traditional treatment with digital assessments and interventions tailored to the specific needs of each patient," says Mestdagh. "The latter receives a notification at certain times during the day to fill in some questions on the smartphone or to do a personalized exercise. The results are immediately forwarded to the therapist, who can then analyze them through an intuitive dashboard with multiple analysis tools."
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"This combined approach of "speaking and smartphone" makes the therapeutic sessions in the office not only more efficient - you already know how the patient felt throughout the week and can be more concise - but also more effective. Because it allows the therapist to intervene directly in the patient's daily life, which is where the psychological change ultimately needs to happen."
Longitudinal research
The spin-off builds on the latest insights in the field of the Experience Sampling Method (ESM): an innovative data collection technique to track thoughts, feelings and experiences for a longer period of time from the same people in their real-life environment. Together with professors Peter Kuppens and Francis Tuerlinckx, the founders of m-Path refined that technique even further, so that they could bring it to clinical practice via a user-friendly app.
"In addition, m-Path has a second use", says Mestdagh. "Since ESM is a good method for conducting multiple surveys in the same group of people over a long period to measure changes over time, the app is also suitable as a tool for longitudinal research by universities and other research institutions."
"So in research practice, our app is also being used. Already more than a hundred universities are using our software today for research in a variety of fields, usually large-scale studies with a thousand participants or more. But that application is separate from use by therapists. Researchers do not have access to data from clinical practice, and vice versa. Moreover, all data is stored on European servers and users can work with a pseudonym, if they wish. Thus, data security and privacy are assured."
