Funding for development and testing of a prototype version of Step Away was provided by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). The prototype version, called the “Location-Based Monitoring and Intervention System for Alcohol Use Disorders (LBMI-A).” was pilot tested with a group of individuals who were actively drinking heavily and met DSM V criteria for an alcohol use disorder. The participants, most of whom were interested in reducing their alcohol consumption, used the system for a brief time period (6 weeks) and were tested on numerous variables both before and after using the LBMI-A. Results indicated that overall alcohol use dropped by over 50% and that their heavy drinking days (more than 5 drinks per day for men and 4drinks per day for women) dropped by more than 60%.
Results from the LBMI-A study were used to develop Step Away (an iPhone app) in 2013. The Step Away prototype, the LBMI-A, was the first stand-alone app to show positive results and it attracted the attention of addictions specialists in the Veterans Affairs Medical Center (Seattle and Palo Alto VA’s) who worked with Dr. Dulin to study the app amongst Veterans with problem drinking. Results are currently being published in academic journals that show that Step Away helped Veterans reduce their drinking substantially (around 50%) and that most Veterans stayed engaged with the app up to 6 months post-download. VA researchers Daniel Blonigen and Eric Hawkins (PI’s of those projects) are currently developing new proposals for large-scale analysis of Step Away in Veterans throughout the United States.
Development of the latest version of Step Away was funded in part by a grant from the NIAAA to Dr. Dulin in 2018. This project is focused on utilizing the results from prior research and user feedback to create a “state of the art” app and to contrast it with a Step Away “chatbot”, a system that will have a conversation with the user (a robot basically) that is currently being created. This project will help us understand ways to increase user engagement with smartphone-based alcohol interventions and will be complete in 2021.