e- Health for Fighting Digital Addiction: a Literature Review

Abstract

BackgroundThe internet highly used worldwide triggers addiction to technology at various age stages. Digital addiction has various negative impacts on health, social, economic, and educational aspects. Various recent studies explained the influence of technology-based interventions to prevent and overcome digital addiction, which indirectly reduced the negative impact of addiction. The purpose of this study was to analyze the use of e-health in various age ranges, the type of e-health used and the type of intervention that uses e-health as a media for fighting digital addiction.MethodThis study is a literature review related to e-health intervention in digital addiction obtained from data bases: SpringerLink, ScienceDirect, ProQues, Ebsco CINAHL, and Google scholar with keywords and booleans: “internet addiction” OR “smartphone addiction” OR “game addiction” AND therapy OR intervention AND “e-health” OR “digital health” OR “digital intervention” OR “digital education. Articles in this review are limited to English articles from 2020-2023. The PRISMA guidline is used as a reference protocol and evaluation of literature review.ResultBased on the 11 articles included in this review, e-health interventions are used as strategy to prevent and treat digital addiction in children, adolescents and adults. The majority of the population who use e-health are adolescents. The type of e-health used as the main intervention was smartphone apps, while game was used as additional intervention. The majority of interventions that can be delivered through e-health are CBT based, while other interventions are behavior monitoring and nudge based.ConclusionE-health intervention can be used as the main and additional intervention to prevent and overcome digital addiction in various ages, especially adolescents, tend to have a high success rate. The development of e-health can be seen as a promising intervention to facilitate healthy digital behavior change.