Smartphone-Based Psychotherapeutic Interventions in Blended Care of Cancer Survivors: Nested Randomized Clinical Trial

Background: Cancer is related to not only physical but also mental suffering. Notably, body image disturbances are highly relevant to cancer-related changes often persisting beyond recovery from cancer. Scalable and low-barrier interventions that can be blended with face-to-face psychotherapy for cancer survivors are highly warranted.

Objective: The aim of the study is to investigate whether smartphone-based bodily interventions are more effective to improve the mood of patients with cancer than smartphone-based fairy tale interventions (control intervention).

Methods: We recruited patients with cancer in 2 Swiss hospitals and conducted daily, fully automated smartphone-based interventions 6 times a week for 5 consecutive weeks, blended with weekly face-to-face group body psychotherapy. We applied 2 types of smartphone-based interventions using a within-subject design, randomly assigning patients daily to either bodily interventions or fairy tales. Each intervention type was presented 3 times a week. For this secondary analysis, 3-level mixed models were estimated with mood assessed by the 3 Multidimensional Mood Questionnaire subscales for good-bad mood, wakefulness, and calmness as key indicators. In addition, the effects on experience of presence, vitality, and burden assessed with visual analog scales were investigated.

Results: Based on the data from s=732 interventions performed by 36 participants, good-bad mood improved (β=.27; 95% CI 0.062-0.483), and participants became calmer (β=.98; 95% CI 0.740-1.211) following smartphone-based interventions. Wakefulness did not significantly change from pre- to postsmartphone-based intervention (β=.17; 95% CI -0.081 to 0.412). This was true for both intervention types. There was no interaction effect of intervention type with change in good-bad mood (β=-.01; 95% CI -0.439 to 0.417), calmness (β=.22; 95% CI -0.228 to 0.728), or wakefulness (β=.14; 95% CI -0.354 to 0.644). Experience of presence (β=.34; 95% CI 0.271-0.417) and vitality (β=.35; 95% CI 0.268-0.426) increased from pre- to postsmartphone-based intervention, while experience of burden decreased (β=-0.40; 95% CI -0.481 to 0.311). Again, these effects were present for both intervention types. There were no significant interaction effects of intervention type with pre- to postintervention changes in experience of presence (β=.14; 95% CI -0.104 to 0.384), experience of vitality (β=.06; 95% CI -0.152 to 0.265), and experience of burden (β=-.16; 95% CI -0.358 to 0.017).

Conclusions: Our results suggest that both smartphone-based audio-guided bodily interventions and fairy tales have the potential to improve the mood of cancer survivors.

Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT03707548; https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT03707548.

International Registered Report Identifier (irrid): RR2-10.1186/s40359-019-0357-1.