Managing the countless triggers, stressors, and challenges of recovery can be overwhelming and isolating. During the road to recovery, your needs will fluctuate at various times, and a strong support system is essential. What if, beyond your support system, you had the tools for recovery literally at your fingertips? University of Wollongong PhD student, Jenna Tregarthen, developed this concept and named it Recovery Record: Eating Disorder Management From the Privacy of Your Phone. This new application is designed to help people manage their eating disorders, in the privacy of their home, with the comfort of endless support.
For Patients:
Recovery Record is designed to keep a food, mood, and thought diary. By tracking eating patterns, thoughts, and moods, you are given the opportunity to identify behavioral trends or triggers. After some progress is made, you might notice recurring patterns or triggers, and can then alter behaviors in a more constructive way.
This app allows you to schedule meal and snack reminders, construct a daily meal plan, earn rewards for reaching goals, and track your own progress.
A great benefit of this program is that it allows you work on your recovery and treatment in between therapy sessions. It offers support and feedback from a tech team 24/7, pushes self-reflection, and …IT’S FREE!
For Physicians:
Recovery Record will replace the more traditional pen-and-paper homework that therapists assign to their patients. It is hypothesized that by using this, physicians will see increased motivation, increased tracking of dietary, cognitive, and emotional habits, and most important –recovery. Physicians are able to automatically track client progress, access web based reports and analytics, and customize rewards, content, and complexity on an individual basis.
This new app appears to be a clever tool that can be used to supplement eating disorder recovery with the proper treatment team. However, I am concerned that it might encourage those with eating disorders to remain in silence, with only the support of an iphone app, and essentially attempt recovery alone.
Last month, Jenna Tregarthen went to work with the Stanford Eating Disorder Clinic to document the app’s results and pilot it in a clinical setting. I’m very curious to read about the results to this innovate study.
“There are 11 million girls suffering eating disorders in the US, and in Australia one in 12 women are expected to have a serious eating disorder at some point. But they rarely tell their families or friends, instead continuing to suffer in silence.”
