JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Real-time monitoring captures information about suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs) as they occur and offers great promise to learn about STBs. However, this approach also introduces questions about how to monitor and respond to real-time information about STBs. Given the increasing use of real-time monitoring, there is a need for novel, effective, and scalable tools for responding to suicide risk in real-time.

Objective:

The goal of this study was to develop and test an automated tool (ResourceBot) that promotes use of crisis services (e.g., 988) in real-time through a rule-based (i.e., if-then) brief barrier reduction intervention.

Methods:

ResourceBot was tested in a two-week real-time monitoring study of 74 adults with recent suicidal thoughts.

Results:

ResourceBot was deployed 221 times to 36 participants. There was high engagement with ResourceBot (i.e., 87% of the time ResourceBot was deployed, a participant opened the tool and submitted a response to it), but zero participants reported using crisis services after engaging with ResourceBot. The most reported reasons for not using crisis services were beliefs that the resources would not help, wanting to handle things on one’s own, and the resources requiring too much time/effort. At the end of the study, participants rated ResourceBot with good useability (M= 75.6 out of 100) and satisfaction (M = 20.8 out of 32).

Conclusions:

This study highlights both possibilities and challenges of developing effective real-time interventions for suicide risk and areas for refinement in future work.