Gambling Habit Hacker

The GAMBLING HABIT HACKER app is an easy-to-use smartphone app that helps individuals meet their own personal goals around gambling. The app is designed to help to target and assist individuals to meet their personal goal, which may be related to reducing the amount of money or time spent gambling, or to not gamble at all. The app steps through setting up daily goals, each day for a month, and then checks in with the user each day to see how they are going, and to provide assistance if needed. It provides the right amount of support, whenever and wherever it is needed most. Using push notifications on an iOS device, brief check-ins will be delivered three times per day. These check-ins will ask questions about gambling since the last check-in, intentions and confidence in achieving goals, any gambling urges or situations, and mood states. Responses to the check-ins identify which strategy options may be the most helpful for the individual at that specific time. The app will then provide a list of strategies that are specifically aligned with the user’s answers. This means that the individual will receive the right support at the right time. The development and evaluation of this app is funded by the New South Wales Office of Responsible Gambling and has been approved by the Deakin University Ethics Committee (2020-304).