New Study Shows mHealth Games Help Children With Autism - And Their Parents

A recent pilot program has found that an mHealth game platform tailored for children with Autism not only improves behavioral health outcomes – it also reduces stress in parents.

The long-awaited results are from a program launched in 2020 by Mightier, a Boston-based connected health company spun out of Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and Arizona-based managed care company Magellan Healthcare. They point to a potentially promising future for mHealth games in helping healthcare providers and families improve care management and outcomes in the home.

“It is important to understand families as a whole, and to not only look at children’s symptoms when deploying an intervention,” Matthew Miller, senior vice president of behavioral health for Magellan Healthcare, said in a press release issued today. “Families using Mightier reported decreased stress, an increase in confidence, and an increase in access to resources relative to control – gains that point to improvements for the child as well as higher functionality for parents and families.” 

According to the study, which involved 36 families divided into two groups, more than 80 percent of the children who played the games in conjunction with applied behavioral analysis (ABA) treatment saw an improvement in their behavioral health, according to their parents, while 55 percent of children who used only ABA treatment saw an improvement.

In particular, parents reported that the combination of mHealth and ABA reduced aggressive behavior in their children twice as much as ABA alone.

In addition, the study saw a 50 percent decrease in stress and even larger increases in confidence and access to resources relative to control among parents whose children used the mHealth platform, compared to parents whose children used ABA treatment alone.

Mightier’s platform combines 25 video games with an mHealth wearable that monitors their heart rate, allowing the children (and their parents) to see how their heart rate fluctuates as they play games. This, in turn, prompts the children to apply coping skills, such as deep breathing, to address that change and manage their stress and frustration.

Mightier and Magellan have been collaborating for several years in the application of mHealth gaming to treatments for children. In February, they announced the launch of another study, involving some 200 members of commercial health plans and $2 million in funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, focusing on a wide range of mental health concerns.

“The COVID-19 pandemic set off a wave of mental health issues for children across the country,” Matthew Miller, senior vice president of behavioral health for Magellan Healthcare, said in a press release. “Even with the availability of a vaccine, stress and anxiety caused by the uncertainty in their lives will linger, at a time when availability of mental health services is minimal, particularly in rural communities. This study’s goal is to validate that digital tools like Mightier can improve health outcomes, lower the cost of care and increase access to mental healthcare.”

“Teaching children emotional regulation, a core life skill, is a powerful insulator against stress and symptoms of many common pediatric mental health disorders,” Jason Kahn, Mightier’s co-founder and chief science officer, said in the release. “This study has the potential to advance pediatric mental services for millions of families.”