Previously submitted to: JMIR Medical Education (no longer under consideration since Apr 12, 2024)
Date Submitted: Jun 28, 2023
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 27, 2023 - Aug 22, 2023
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Development and use of a meditation app (Med@Med) for and by medical students: motivations, adherence and emotional effects
ABSTRACT
Background:
The well-being of medical students is affected by their high stress levels. Several methods can be used in medical schools to manage stress levels and mindfulness interventions emerge as possible interventions. The use of mindfulness mediation apps specifically produced for the specific requirements of medical students and in their native language needs to be considered.
Objective:
We aimed to develop a meditation app totally prepared in Portuguese (Med@Med) which included short-guided meditations with a language adequate to the medical school context. The app was freely available for the medical students of the Faculty of Medicine of Porto (FMUP), Portugal. The motivation to use the app, the adherence and the emotional benefits were evaluated.
Methods:
The students were enrolled in the project by sending e-mails and acessiong the main motivation to participate. The students had access to 21 daily consecutive meditations lasting for 10-15 minutes. Students completed an emotional regulation questionnaire (Emotion Regulation of Others and Self; EROS) and the emotional thermometers (ET´s), before the first meditation and at the end of the project. Before and after each meditation practice, the students were invited to identify their basic emotion (joy, fear, disgust, anger or sadness) or no perceived emotion/no reply. Participants received daily motivational messages (scientific or in lay language) or no message during the first 7 days of the project and the retention was registered.
Results:
A total of 147 students were enrolled. Their main motivations were to experience meditation (33%), decrease stress/anxiety (25%) or implement a daily meditation routine (16%). The remaining motivations of the students were improvement of sleep or academic performance. The self-motivation to use the app was high (7.3±3.2 in a 1-10 scale). Participants that received daily messages in lay language which summarized scientific findings about the benefits of meditation, were more likely to continue to use the app. The emotions changed from pre- to post-practice, with an increase in self-identification with joy and decrease of fear and sadness. An improvement on the intrinsic emotional regulation subscale (EROS; p<0.01) was detected. In comparison with age-matched FMUP medical students that did not use the Med@Med app, the students that used the app presented less emotional distress and anxiety as evaluated by ET´s.
Conclusions:
This exploratory study shows that medical students are motivated to use a meditation app. The improvements in emotion-related parameters after the use of the Med@Med app is a promising result. The benefits of using the Med@Med meditation app prepared in Portuguese and considering the needs of medical students should be evaluated in other Portuguese-speaking medical schools.
Citation
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