KDH Research & Communication has received funding from the National Institutes of Health to develop and evaluate the Personalized Approaches to Habits – Sleep (PATH-S), a gamified phone app to encourage teens to improve their sleep through consistent habits.
The Challenge
Did you know that only 25% of high school students sleep for the recommended 8-10 hours every night? Teens who sleep less than 8 hours per night are more likely to experience stress, anxiety, impaired decision making, and worsened memory compared to teens who sleep at least 8 hours per night. What’s more, minority teens, female teens, 12th grade students, teens with low household income, and teens with asthma are at greater risk of a poor night’s sleep.
Sleep is essential for brain function, physical health, and emotional well-being, yet fewer teens in 2023 slept at least 8 hours compared to teens in 2013. Teens face unique barriers to sleeping enough, compared to other age ranges, as they are balancing early school schedules, schoolwork, extracurricular activities, and jobs as well as managing hormones, stress, and anxiety.
Our Approach
Even small changes in sleep habits (which the app calls microhabits) can lead to substantial improvements in sleep health, provided the changes are implementable, consistent, and flexible. PATH-S educates teens on healthy sleep behavior and supports teens to adopt and maintain their microhabits and improve their sleep through casual gaming and intermittent reinforcement techniques. The app contains personalized microhabit suggestions, a daily survey to track their sleep and microhabit completion, a story, and a weekly data visualization dashboard.
The PATH-S study is a two-group feasibility study to explore the extent to which PATH-S participation positively impacts sleep knowledge, beliefs about sleep, and self-efficacy. Come back soon for results of our study.
