Our founder takes the stage at Digital Health Festival 2025

Nick Davies and Deakin’s Cleo Anderson share insights and key findings from co-designing the Resilience eDBT app at the 2025 Digital Health Festival.

The Digital Health Festival 2025, held in Melbourne, is Australia’s premier event for digital health innovation. Bringing together thousands of healthcare leaders, researchers, and innovators, the festival fosters meaningful conversations about the future of healthcare. We were proud to be part of this dialogue, showcasing our commitment to human-centred design and the role it plays in shaping effective, compassionate digital health solutions.

As part of the presentation “Delivering DBT for binge eating through an evidence-based mobile app”, our founder joined Graduate Researcher Cleo Anderson from Deakin University to share the journey behind Resilience eDBT—a mobile app delivering evidence-based Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) for individuals experiencing binge eating. This collaboration, which also included Dr. Jake Linardon (Senior Research Fellow at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia), highlights the power of thoughtful, co-designed digital tools to make mental health support more accessible, effective, and empathetic.

Cleo highlighted the limitations of existing mental health apps and the challenges they present. Recognising the need to address these issues, the Deakin team understood that partnering with an experienced app design and development team was crucial to bringing their vision to life and ensuring a seamless user experience. That’s where Spark Digital came in.

Nick explores the design challenge

Nick spoke to the core design challenge – turning a clinical therapy model into an app people actually want to use. Everything—from colour choices to tone of voice—was carefully crafted to feel therapeutic rather than clinical. The app delivers DBT-based skills like emotion regulation, mindfulness, and distress tolerance through five streamlined modules, using bite-sized text, voice guidance, and simple interactive elements optimised for mobile.

A key feature is the Diary Card, which tracks mood, behaviours, and skills, helping users recognise emotional patterns and monitor progress—particularly around binge eating episodes and associated emotions like anger, sadness, and anxiety. Users can compare trends over time, enhancing self-awareness. To encourage engagement, the app includes gamified elements such as rewards and badges.

Following development and functional testing, the team at Deakin conducted usability testing to ensure the experience was intuitive and effective for the target cohort.

The findings clearly demonstrated the impact

Cleo highlighted user research, including a randomised controlled trial with 576 participants and follow-up interviews which demonstrated Resilience’s effectiveness.

• 31% Reduction in binge-eating episodes within 6 weeks (incidence rate ratio = 0.69), with continued improvement at 12 weeks.
• Significant decrease in global eating disorder psychopathology (effect size = -0.68).
• Broader benefits: Reduced concerns about weight, shape, dietary restraint, and compensatory behaviours.
• Improved emotional regulation: Participants reported greater mindfulness and emotional regulation—key goals of DBT.

Although engagement declined over time—common in digital interventions—the app still delivered significant results with minimal professional involvement, reinforcing its value as an accessible mental health resource.

The findings provided valuable insights into potential strategies for increasing sustained engagement, such as enhanced personalisation, notifications, and continued efforts to address ongoing engagement challenges.

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