Counselling services close at 5pm. Gambling doesn’t. How researchers from Deakin University and the Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation used Cogniss to build digital tools that meet people in their most vulnerable moments, and what the results reveal about the future of behavioural health support.
The urge to gamble rarely arrives at a convenient time. It might come on a Tuesday afternoon, or late on a Friday night, or at two in the morning when every support service is closed and the nearest casino is twenty minutes away. For people trying to change their relationship with gambling, the gap between when they need help and when help is available has always been one of the hardest problems to solve.
Traditional treatment works. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Motivational Interviewing are both clinically proven to help people quit or reduce gambling. But they share a structural limitation: they happen in a room, on a schedule, with a counsellor whose working hours don’t align with the moments when their clients are most at risk. “The challenge with gambling harm,” says Shane Lucas, CEO of the Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation, “is that barriers like stigma can prevent people from seeking help in the first place. And when someone does want help, they need to be able to access it immediately.”
Two research teams, one at Deakin University working with the Foundation, another spanning Deakin and the University of Auckland, had been wrestling with the same question from different angles. Both believed the answer lay in mobile technology. Both were building toward tools that could put clinical-grade support in someone’s pocket, available around the clock. What they needed was a way to build those tools without the cost and complexity of traditional software development.
Putting the Clinic in the Pocket
The Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation had a clear vision for what would become the Reset app. It needed to do what a skilled counsellor does in a session: help a person understand why they gamble, identify their triggers, set meaningful goals, and build practical strategies for managing urges and handling relapse. It needed to be evidence-based, drawing on the same CBT and Motivational Interviewing techniques used in clinical practice. And it needed to be something a person could use alone, at home, on their own schedule, without ever having to walk into a room and tell a stranger they had a gambling problem.
That last requirement mattered more than it might seem. Stigma is one of the most persistent barriers in gambling harm treatment. Many people who need support never seek it, not because the services don’t exist, but because asking for help means admitting, out loud and to another person, that gambling has become a problem. A self-guided app removes that barrier entirely. The threshold for opening an app at midnight is considerably lower than the threshold for booking a counselling appointment.
Working with researchers from Deakin University and funded by a $200,000 investment from the Victorian Government, the Foundation used Cogniss to build Reset. The platform’s library of pre-built behavioural health tools meant the team could focus entirely on the therapeutic design of the app rather than its technical architecture. Personalized goal-setting, daily check-ins, adaptive feedback based on a user’s gambling patterns, modular activities for managing urges and relapse, each feature was assembled and configured without writing a line of code.
“The Reset app uses evidence-based best practice to mirror the experience of, or interventions used in, a counselling setting,” Lucas says. It was clinically tested for use as a standalone tool or alongside traditional in-person support, a recognition that for many people, the path to recovery isn’t either-or. Some users would never see a counsellor. Others would use the app between sessions, maintaining momentum in the hours and days when their therapist wasn’t available.
The Moment of Highest Risk
While the Foundation was building Reset, a parallel research effort was pushing the question further. The team at Deakin and the University of Auckland weren’t just asking how to support people in recovery, they were asking how to intervene at the exact moment when a person was most likely to relapse.
The result was GamblingLess: In-The-Moment, and its design reflects a specific theory about how behavioral change actually works. Most digital health tools operate on a schedule: check in every day, complete a weekly module, review your progress at the end of the month. GamblingLess was built around a different premise. The researchers drew on two frameworks from clinical psychology, Ecological Momentary Assessment, which captures a person’s state in real time rather than relying on memory, and Just-in-Time Adaptive Interventions, which deliver support precisely when and where it is most needed.
In practice, this meant building an app that could detect vulnerability and respond to it. Users receive short check-in prompts asking about their current urges, triggers, expectations and recent behaviour. Based on their responses, the app delivers a tailored intervention: a strategy to manage a specific urge, a technique for addressing a known trigger, a reframe for a distorted expectation about gambling outcomes. The support is discreet, immediate, and calibrated to the individual’s state in that precise moment.
Again, Cogniss provided the infrastructure. The platform’s ability to trigger activities based on user responses, one of its core behavioral features, was central to how GamblingLess worked. Building that kind of adaptive, responsive system from scratch would have required significant engineering resources and months of development time. Using Cogniss, the research team could focus on the clinical logic of the intervention rather than its technical execution.
What the Numbers Say
GamblingLess was tested in a 28-day micro-randomized controlled trial with at-risk gamblers, a rigorous design that allows researchers to test and refine specific intervention components in real time rather than waiting for a traditional trial to conclude. At the six-month mark, 67 percent of participants reported recovery or significant improvement in gambling symptoms. Subsequent feasibility studies showed sustained engagement and impact, with 62 percent reporting full recovery.
Those figures are striking in any context. They are particularly striking given what they represent: people who were struggling with gambling harm, reached through a smartphone app, at the moments when they were most at risk, supported by a tool that cost a fraction of what a traditional software development project would have required.
The app is now publicly available through GambleAware NSW, funded by the New South Wales government. Reset, meanwhile, is available free on the App Store and Google Play across Australia. Both tools exist not as replacements for clinical care but as an extension of it, filling the hours and the moments that counselling services cannot reach.
A Different Kind of Scale
There is a version of this story that is about apps and platforms and development costs. But the more interesting version is about what it means to scale clinical expertise.
A skilled gambling counsellor can support a certain number of clients each week. They can be present during business hours. They can provide evidence-based interventions in a therapeutic relationship built over time. What they cannot do is be present at 2am on a Tuesday when one of their clients is sitting alone with a phone and a strong urge to gamble. That is not a failure of counselling. It is a structural limitation of how care has always been delivered.
What Reset and GamblingLess demonstrate is that the clinical knowledge embedded in CBT and Motivational Interviewing can be translated into a digital format that is available at any hour, to anyone with a smartphone, without a waiting list or an appointment or the courage required to ask for help face to face. The therapeutic expertise doesn’t disappear. It scales.
For the researchers and clinicians who built these tools, that distinction matters. “This app is an important addition to our suite of gambling harm treatment and support options,” Lucas says of Reset. The word ‘addition’ is doing real work in that sentence. The goal was never to replace human support. It was to make sure that support existed in the moments when nothing else did.
Comments
Post a Comment