(2021-05-11) Large Scale Study Finds Mental Health App Forms Bond With Users Marking Key Evolution In Digital Therapeutics

Woebot Health: Large-Scale Study Finds Mental Health App Forms Bond with Users, Marking Key Evolution in Digital Therapeutics. ...its most recent study, titled “Evidence of human-level bonds established with a digital conversational agent,” have been published in the open access journal JMIR Formative Research

Among a large sample of 36,070 users, the study provides evidence that Woebot, the company’s proprietary relational agent, establishes a therapeutic bond with users—a construct long thought to be the unique domain of human-to-human interactions.

According to the study, the bond that Woebot formed with users appeared to be non-inferior to the bond created between human therapists and patients. Participants’ bond with Woebot was also established in just 3-5 days—far faster than the bond scores in the comparison studies that were all measured between 2 and 6 weeks

“I’ve always believed that technology could be truly helpful at an emotional level, if it’s designed and delivered in a human-centered way,” said Woebot Health Founder and President Alison Darcy, Ph.D

therapeutic bond within a mental health context is measured as an element of the Working Alliance Inventory-Short Revised (WAI-SR). The WAI-SR is a measure that assesses three key aspects of the therapeutic alliance: agreement on the tasks of therapy; agreement on the goals of therapy; and, as explored in this study, development of an affective bond.