JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Dyadic psychosocial interventions have been found beneficial both for people coping with mental or physical health conditions as well as their family members and friends who provide them with support. Delivering these interventions by eHealth may help increase their scalability and accessibility.

Objective:

This scoping review provides the first comprehensive overview of dyadic psychosocial eHealth interventions for individuals of all ages affected by mental or physical illness and their family members or friends who support them. The goal is to understand how dyadic eHealth interventions have been used and to highlight areas of research needed to advance dyadic eHealth intervention development and dissemination.

Methods:

A comprehensive electronic literature search for articles in the English language and for all available dates through March 2019 was conducted. Eligible records described a psychosocial eHealth intervention that intervened with both care recipients and their support person(s).

Results:

7,113 potentially eligible records were reviewed – 101 records met eligibility criteria that described 52 different unique dyadic eHealth interventions, which were tested across 73 different unique trials. Of the unique interventions, 33 were conducted among dyads of children and their supporting parent, 1 was conducted with an adolescent-young adult care recipient population, and the remaining 18 were conducted among adult dyads with diverse relationships. Interventions tended to deliver content through multiple modalities (M=3.03), and over three-quarters of all interventions required some human support from research staff or clinicians. Trials of dyadic eHealth interventions were most commonly RCTs (n=44), and most RCTs compared the dyadic eHealth intervention to usual care (n=23). When primary outcomes were specified, the results of the dyadic eHealth intervention tended to be positive for care recipients, but evidence of effects for support persons are limited due to less than one-quarter of records specifying primary outcomes for support persons.

Conclusions:

Overall, findings from this first comprehensive review of dyadic eHealth interventions suggest that the literature supporting the use of eHealth to deliver dyadic interventions is substantial, diverse, and growing. Although the literature on dyadic eHealth interventions is robust, there are significant gaps that point to important future research goals. Issues include few studies designed to evaluate the unique effects of dyadic interventions relative to individual interventions, limited assessment and reporting of outcomes for support persons, as well as the lack of any interventions specifically targeting the needs of older adult dyads. By summarizing broadly across the literature, findings highlight areas of research opportunities for developing dyadic eHealth interventions for novel populations and increasing automation of dyadic care.