Behavioral Health Business February 27, 2022
A study from researchers at MIT took a dive into the impact of the mindfulness content offered through the app of the startup Headspace, now part of Headspace Health.
In short, the app showed meaningful impacts on stress, depression and anxiety when compared with traditional therapy, validation of claims of efficacy from many advocates of digital mental health apps.
The study looked at the Headspace app in the context of applied behavioral economics and, in this instance, argued that people make suboptimal decisions when influenced by “irrelevant emotional states and worries.”
While the study authors — Advik Shreekumar and Pierre-Luc Vautrey — state that there are limitations on the findings given the episodic nature of their experiments,...