With all the doomsday predictions about technology, what is true is that it can still benefit our lives. That is the hope that consumers carry when they download a new app to manage their diet or help with their depression.

So the question is: how can app developers genuinely strive to live up to those expectations? What is the ideal mental health app?

Research-based

The app should utilize evidence-based strategies to help users manage their mental health. An app that lets users free-journal? Track their mood? Practice deep breathing and positive thinking? There should be a scientific-backing for each of these practices. Otherwise, the app runs the risk of being another manifestation of medical quackery.

CBT4CBT, founded by Dr. Kathleen Carrol from Yale University, uses “interactive exercises, moves, and graphics” to help combat drug and alcohol addiction. It’s showing promise, based on research.

In clinical studies, the app proved to be just as effective, if not more, than in-person consultations, according to Carroll.

“Our first trials evaluated CBT4CBT as an add-on to standard substance use treatment, and we showed that it improved substance use outcomes and patients really liked it. Our later trials showed that with just minimal clinical monitoring (a ten minute check-in every week or so), CBT4CBT did better than standard treatment and the effects lasted longer,” she told Healthline.

And patients preferred CBT4CBT to group treatment. “Coming in to a treatment center and sitting in groups isn’t attractive to a lot of people,” Carroll added.

Her team found that like clinical cognitive based therapy (CBT), the app’s effects are highly durable and provide lasting benefits: People actually learn the skills they’re trying to teach, she said.

Can your therapist be replaced by an app? (Healthline)

Transparent policies

Let’s face it: mining user data is how app developers make the big bucks. But not everyone thinks about that when downloading an app. If app devs are going to do it, they should be transparent, and let their users decide where their boundaries are. Chances are, they might not care. But that’s on them.

Ideally, these well-researched apps would come from scientific institutions with enough government or philanthropic funding that they don’t need to resort to selling off their user data to third-parties. But even then, the development may not move fast enough to accommodate a growing hunger for accessible mental healthcare. Still, if we decide as a society that enabling people to get mental healthcare is important, that is one avenue to seriously consider.

Keep ’em coming back

The app can function as it should, but it’s no use if users stop using it after a few weeks. So how can app devs keep them engaged long enough to experience results? What’s wrong with the current wellness apps on the market?

Or, does it have to do with our increasingly shortening attention span? If a patient has a mental disorder that could be helped with an app, maybe some doctor encouragement would help them stay engaged. Whatever the case, this would be an important research question for future study.