2024/03/20 by Hesse, Gerhard, Kastellis, Georg
#Medicine and health
paper · doi:10.3205/zaud000039
Digital health applications (DiGA) have become prescribable in recent years. Two apps have been approved for the treatment of chronic tinnitus. The Kalmeda app promises to offer “guideline-based” tinnitus-specific behavioral therapy for managing chronic tinnitus. This review describes the application and reports on the study published by the developers of the app and its results, which appear to demonstrate very good effectiveness in the treatment of chronic tinnitus. However, it also reports the difficulties and risks of this app, such as the app’s requirement for access to participants' photos and thus data protection concerns or difficulties in uploading and using the app, and it reports on so-called “real-life results”, which were collected by a health insurance company in a recent survey and which found less evidence regarding the effectiveness of this application. Independent studies are required for a final evaluation of this form of therapy as a digital application and the results remain to be seen.