Development and Validation of an mHealth App for Soldier’s Mental Health Screening (Preprint)
Authors: Lee Byungseok , Kang Museok , Park Junhyo , Kim Jinwoo , Jung Changwook , Kim Hoyoung 
Published: February 2023

BACKGROUND

Soldiers are difficult to visit hospitals frequently due to their job characteristics, and military hospitals and a number of counseling centers set up for mental health are also focusing on post-management in the form of "treatment" rather than "selecting" mental health risks in advance. Beyond treating the mental health of soldiers exposed to such serious situations, it is necessary to select risks in advance and reduce the severity of mental health through preemptive management.

OBJECTIVE

The purpose of this study is to develop mHealth services for screening mental health of soldiers, and to verify the developed services, and to compare reliability and validity with the pre-developed mHealth services.

METHODS

This study developed to ensure the reliability and validity of the service mhealth research(n=133). The study participants responded to six clinical scales through the developed mHealth and tried to confirm the reliability and validity of the scale by using the response result values. After that, it is intended to check whether it can be used in real-time through comparison with the mHealth service developed and verified in advance. The method of verifying the mHealth service developed in advance by the research team aims to verify the reliability and validity of the response value in the same way as before, and to this end, data from general workers (n=7,847) were collected. After that, stratified random extraction was performed at the same rate as the military demographic information, and the response values of 133 people were used, and the reliability and validity of the two services were later confirmed.

RESULTS

For the purpose of this study, developed a confidence level of analysis to verify the service mhealth. The reliability of the in-service clinical scale developed for soldiers (0.737-0.914) was at the level, and the reliability of the service developed for workers (0.721-0.886), and the clinical scales used in the two services were reliable. Since then, the model fit of the service developed for soldiers has been χ² = 150.468(p < .001), χ²/df = 1.551, TLI = .939, CFI = .956, RMSEA = .065. In addition, the service model fit developed for workers is χ² = 64.315(p = .011), χ²/df = 1.569, TLI = .965, CFI = .978, RMSEA = .066 . It was shown as and confirmed that it was suitable. After that, it was confirmed that both the convergence validity and discrimination validity analysis conducted for the confirmatory factor analysis of the service were suitable.

CONCLUSIONS

This study is an initial study that confirmed the reliability and validity through the verification of the mHealth service developed for soldiers and the feasibility through comparison with the verified mHealth service. In view of this, it is meaningful to develop actual services and develop mHealth services suitable for soldiers.

CLINICALTRIAL

This study was conducted with the approval of the Research Ethics Review Committee of Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea (IRB No. 7001988-202205-HR-1584-03)