Development and use of a meditation app (Med@Med) by medical students: motivations, adherence and emotional effects

Abstract

Medical students report high stress levels which affect their well-being and health. Due to the high rates of self-perceived stress amongst the medical students of our the Faculty of Medicine of Porto (FMUP), we performed a project with three goals: (1) develop a meditation app (Med@Med), created specifically for the FMUP students, consisting of 21 daily consecutive short- guided meditation practices recorded in Portuguese; (2) evaluate the motivations and interests for using the app; (3) analyse the persistence and emotional benefits of the Med@Med app. Students (N=147) adhered to the project. The main motivations resported were: try a meditation practice for the first time (33%), decrease stress/anxiety (25%) or implement a daily meditation routine (16%). The motivation to adhere was high (7.3±3.2, scale 1 to 10). Participants that received daily motivational Whatsapp messages to use the app, in lay language, were more prone to access the practices. If the messages contained a short summary of scientific results about the benefits of meditation, the adherence decreased to levels similar to students that did not receive any messages. Aditionally, students were invited to choose an icon identifying a basic emotion (joy, fear, disgust, anger or sadness), or no emotion at all, before and after each meditation practice. Results showed that the emotional patterns changed in the 2 moments, specifically with a detected decrease in the self-identification of the icons fear and sadness. Furthermore, students were asked to complete the EROS (Emotion Regulation of Others and Self) scale, before initiating the first meditation and at the end of the project. An improvement on the intrinsic emotional regulation subscale (p<0.01). This exploratory study shows that medical students of FMUP are generally motivated to use the Med@Med meditation app. Strategies to improve their persistence should be considered inasmuch that the results obtained indicate improvements in emotion-related parameters.