Mental Health App and Impact on Wellbeing

Mental health concerns across the United States have increased substantially, affecting individuals across age groups, geographic regions, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Emerging adults demonstrate the highest prevalence of mental health conditions among adult populations, while simultaneously exhibiting the lowest rates of treatment utilization. Barriers to treatment for this population include limited affordability, accessibility, availability, and acceptability of mental health services. Digital mental health interventions have demonstrated effectiveness across a range of outcomes, including symptom reduction, self-management, and well-being enhancement. Smartphone-based applications, in particular, have been evaluated as tools to integrate mental health support through scalable and accessible technologies. Such applications may offer features including guided self-help activities, mindfulness practices, journaling, mood tracking, psychoeducational content, and location-based resources for mental health services. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, mental health challenges among U.S. college students have intensified, with documented impacts on academic performance and overall functioning. These challenges are further exacerbated by stigma, financial constraints, and limited access to campus-based or community mental health services, particularly for students from historically marginalized backgrounds. In response to these needs, Penn State Behrend's Virtual/Augmented Reality (VAR) Lab developed the Landing Place mental health app, a free digital intervention designed to support mental wellness among college students in the Erie region. The application was developed with an emphasis on usability, privacy, and accessibility, and is tailored to the developmental and contextual needs of young adults. Planned future iterations of the application aim to extend its use to additional populations, such as survivors of domestic violence. The Landing Place app incorporates artificial intelligence, supported features and evidence-based therapeutic components, including mindfulness exercises, goal-setting activities, journaling, mood tracking, and educational content related to mental health and coping strategies. This clinical trial evaluates the effectiveness, usability, and acceptability of the application when used as a self-guided mental wellness intervention among college students. The study examines multiple forms of data, including behavioral change measures, user engagement metrics, usability assessments, and participant feedback, to assess the app's utility in supporting well-being. It is hypothesized that participants who use the application will demonstrate increased well-being compared to a control group, along with higher engagement and acceptability of the app-based intervention modality.