A group of researchers at Brown are developing an app to reduce drinking in young adults and encourage healthier drinking habits.
The researchers just completed a second open trial to test the feasibility of the app, named Alcohol, Reflection and Morning Evaluation, or A-FRAME. A randomized trial is being launched, according to a press release from the school.
The main goal of the second trial was to “confirm the latest version of the tool was acceptable to young adults,” Jennifer Merrill, an associate professor of behavioral and social sciences and the team lead, wrote in an email to The Herald. “We wanted to test whether they would actually use it for 28 days and find it valuable to use.”
These results and feedback were positive, Merrill explained, with users appreciating “the different feedback features, the ability to make choices about what feedback they wanted to get, and ability to set goals that are specific to their own interests.”
A-FRAME personalizes daily feedback by using information that users enter about their alcohol use the previous day, Merrill wrote. This can include how much and what participants drank, among other details from their experiences.
The program gives participants an analysis of their drinking experiences, such as “how last night’s drinking compares to what the ‘typical’ young adult drinks, or a calculation of what blood alcohol concentration they reached the day before,” Merrill explained. Users can set goals depending on how they would like to change their drinking habits.
The program was set for participants to use over the course of 28 days, but some participants indicated that they wanted to use it for longer, Merrill added. Currently, the app is still not fully developed and the program is operated through a survey platform.
“Once we transition to an actual app-based program, I think people could make decisions themselves about how long they found it useful,” she wrote.
The sample wasn’t limited to college students. Zoe Logan, a senior research assistant at the Merrill lab, said the team also hopes to connect with “adult education areas in Rhode Island” and across the country. They have reached out to unions in the area, particularly because many young adults who did not attend university went to tech school and are now a part of unions.
The team hopes to “build longer-standing relationships with these types of institutions to make sure that their young people, who they have working for them, are getting these supports in the same way that university students get them too,” Logan said.
Other studies often neglect to study non-college students, which can result in biased samples, she added.
About half of the trial’s participants are non-university students, which includes students at technical schools and community colleges. Recruitment for the ongoing randomized trial began in August and will continue until February 2025, with the final round of data collection coming in during March.
In addition to the information collected from the daily surveys, participants also take part in a “final post-trial interview about how usable and interesting participants found the app to be,” Roselyn Peterson, a postdoctoral fellow on the team, wrote in an email to The Herald.
The program has changed with feedback from prior trial participants. The app was altered to “allow even more goal options, leave the survey open longer, turning the interface into a formal app with app capabilities, assess drinking reasons/context, and make more connections with research,” according to Peterson.
Once the data is collected, the researchers will look for any trends that indicate long- or short-term effects on individual drinking habits. But they still intend to transform the program into an app, Logan said.
“The next step is really hoping to get the next round of funding for this to actually put it into software and hire a programmer who can do an application for us,” she said.
