The Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment has recently published a Special Issue of its journal on “Technology-based Interventions for the Treatment and Recovery Management of Substance Use Disorders”. This Special Issue was Co-edited by CTBH Director, Lisa A. Marsch, PhD, CTBH Advisory Board Member, Kathleen Carroll, PhD and colleague Brian Kiluk, PhD.

Mobile health technology (mHealth) brings great opportunity to improve quality of life, promote individual and public health, and reduce healthcare costs. Although mHealth devices and applications are proliferating, many challenges remain to understand how to provide the necessary usability, manageability, interoperability, availability, security, and privacy of these applications. Sarah Lord, PhD, Director of the Dissemination and Implementation Science Core of CTBH is part of a team of investigators at Dartmouth and Clemson University working on a recently funded National Science Foundation project to develop and evaluate feasibility of wearable computational jewelry for health-monitoring and management. The project, called Amulet, is being led by CTBH affiliate David Kotz, PhD, Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth.

The Pilot Project Core of CTBH is designed to support novel pilot project grants that facilitate the rapid execution of research and offer considerable promise to have a large impact on the field. CTBH has funded 13 innovative pilot projects on topics ranging from novel mobile health methodologies and analytics, passive sensing via wearable sensors, and novel technology-based interventions.

The primary mission of CTBH is to serve as a centralized resource for knowledge about evidence-based technology-based behavior change interventions targeting substance use disorders and related issues (including HIV and Co-Occurring Disorders). Exposure and the ability to successfully try out new treatment approaches increase likelihood of program adoption. To this end, CTBH’s Dissemination & Implementation (D&I) team is developing a repository of annotated summaries of the evidence for technology-based interventions described in published literature. This online resource provides an easily accessible synthesis of information for diverse audiences about the availability of technology-based interventions for individuals with substance use disorders, the empirical evidence in support of each intervention, and references to obtain further information about each intervention.

Researchers at the Dartmouth CTBH have received a grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to conduct a systematic evaluation of the effectiveness of a web-based motivational decision support system designed specifically for a population of smokers with severe mental illness. The study team, led by Principal Investigator Mary Brunette, MD, will conduct a 3-year randomized, controlled trial evaluating this intervention with smokers with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorders recruited from two large community mental health centers. The study will be conducted in partnership with Thresholds in Chicago and the Rutgers-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey.