CBT-i Coach

US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)

About this app

CBT-i Coach is for people who are engaged in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia with a health provider, or who have experienced symptoms of insomnia and would like to improve their sleep habits. The app will guide you through the process of learning about sleep, developing positive sleep routines, and improving your sleep environment. It provides a structured program that teaches strategies proven to improve sleep and help alleviate symptoms of insomnia.

CBT-i Coach is intended to augment face-to-face care with a healthcare professional. It can be used on its own, but it is not intended to replace therapy for those who need it.

CBT-i Coach is based on the therapy manual, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia in Veterans, by Rachel Manber, Ph.D., Leah Friedman, Ph.D., Colleen Carney, Ph.D., Jack Edinger, Ph.D., Dana Epstein, Ph.D., Patricia Haynes, Ph.D., Wilfred Pigeon, Ph.D. and Allison Siebern, Ph.D. CBT-i has been shown to be efficacious for insomnia for both Veterans and civilians.

CBT-i Coach was a collaborative effort between VA’s National Center for PTSD, Stanford School of Medicine, and DoD’s National Center for Telehealth and Technology.

Ratings and reviews

This is the best app I've found for tracking sleep while doing CBT-I or SRT. It asks the right questions to get the data it needs, and then displays the data in handy charts. I would give it 5 stars except that after the most recent update, the "nightly awakenings" chart disappeared, and when you add a new sleep diary entry, the date no longer defaults to the current day, which means you have to go searching for it in the calendar before continuing.

Overall this app works well. There are some issues I have noticed regarding calculations varying between the Android and Apple versions. In the Android version, there are two sets of averages on the screen for every score (SE, Time Asleep, etc.). I realized the averages at the top of each chart reflect all entries cumulatively and the averages listed at the bottom of the chart are more in line for the past week's worth of entries. Also there should be a Sleep Need questionnaire in "Assessment"!

This works okay, but there's a lot of room for improvement. It's not overly convenient to navigate, the summary only goes back 7 days, you can't update some items (such as weekly assessments), and some of the calculations are incorrect. For instance, the total time in bed calculation does not count how much time you're in bed before you try to fall asleep, which makes no sense. In some cases, the calculated time asleep is flat out wrong.

What's new

* Fixed the bug with the date of new sleep diary entries
* Bug fixes and compatibility improvements