PAUSE App — Digital Wellness Platform

Origin story

A measurement tool that didn't exist.

PAUSE — Preventive Approach to Unhealthy Screen Exposure — was born out of a simple observation. In community medicine, we treat populations, not just patients. And what we kept seeing was invisible — people anxious from midnight health searches, students fragmenting their attention across endless feeds, professionals unable to switch off. The harm was real. The measurement tools weren't. So we built one.

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Not a tech company. A community medicine department that got tired of watching a problem go unmeasured — and decided to do something about it.

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Built on evidence

Built on evidence, not opinion.

PAUSE doesn't estimate your digital health — it measures it. Every scale used in this app has been peer-reviewed, validated on real populations, and proven to reliably detect genuine disorder.

Your Digital Wellness Score (DWS) is a composite of all six instruments, giving you a single number that reflects your overall digital wellbeing — not a guess, not a gimmick, not a wellness vibe-check. A number that means something because the methodology behind it does.

Six disorders, six validated scales

What PAUSE actually screens for.

Every disorder in PAUSE is screened with a peer-reviewed, published instrument — not invented questions. Each scale is faithfully reproduced from the validation paper, with severity bands taken directly from the original authors where established, or pragmatically labelled where the published literature has not yet set cut-offs.

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Cyberchondria

SCALE · CSS-12

Excessive online searching for health information that amplifies, rather than resolves, health anxiety. The 12-item Cyberchondria Severity Scale (short form) measures four sub-domains — compulsion, distress, excessiveness, and reassurance-seeking.

Research note: the PAUSE app uses the short form (CSS-12). Copyright permission obtained from Dr. Eoin McElroy.

Items

12

Max score

60

Bands

4

McElroy, Kearney, Touhey, Evans, Cooke & Shevlin (2019). Cyberchondria Severity Scale – Short Form (CSS-12).

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Social Media Addiction

SCALE · BSMAS

Problematic social-media use assessed across the classical six addiction criteria — salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict, and relapse. One of the most widely cited social-media addiction instruments in academic literature.

Items

6

Max score

30

Bands

4

Andreassen, Billieux, Griffiths, Kuss, Demetrovics, Mazzoni & Pallesen (2016). Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale.

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Short-Form Video Addiction

SCALE · SVAS-6

Compulsive consumption of short-form video content — TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts. One of the more recently developed instruments in the platform, addressing a behaviour pattern that older addiction scales were not designed to capture.

Items

6

Max score

30

Bands

4

Galanis, P. Short-Form Video Addiction Scale (SVAS-6). Used with written permission from the original author.

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Gaming Disorder

SCALE · GDT-4

The four-item Gaming Disorder Test, directly aligned with WHO ICD-11 Gaming Disorder criteria — loss of control, gaming given priority, and continuation despite negative consequences. A brief, clinically rigorous screen.

Items

4

Max score

20

Bands

4

Pontes, Schivinski, Sindermann, Li, Becker, Zhou & Montag (2021). Gaming Disorder Test · WHO ICD-11 aligned.

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AI Dependency

SCALE · PCUS

Problematic ChatGPT Use Scale, adapted (with written permission from the original author) to cover all major AI chatbots — ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. Single-factor structure, 4-point Likert, 2-week recall window. One of the first instruments built for the AI-assistant era.

Items

11

Max score

44

Bands

4

Yu, Chen & Yang (2024). Problematic ChatGPT Use Scale (PCUS). Current Psychology, 43(31), 26080–26092. DOI: 10.1007/s12144-024-06259-z. Adapted with author permission.

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Digital Work Addiction

SCALE · BWAS

The Bergen Work Addiction Scale, applied to digital work contexts — email overload, always-on remote work culture, compulsive online work that displaces rest, hobbies, and recovery. Seven items grounded in established work-addiction theory.

Items

7

Max score

35

Bands

4

Andreassen, Griffiths, Hetland & Pallesen (2012). Bergen Work Addiction Scale.

Use permissions on file

Explicit copyright permission obtained from the scale authors for use of the three non-CC-licensed instruments in PAUSE: Dr. Eoin McElroy for CSS-12, Dr. Petros Galanis for SVAS-6, and Dr. Sen-Chi Yu for PCUS-11. BSMAS, GDT-4, and BWAS are used under their respective public/open-licence terms with full attribution to the original authors.

Beyond the disorder scales

Four health impact modules.

Beyond the six disorders, PAUSE measures the downstream health consequences of digital use across four core impact domains. Each module uses three short Likert-scale items — twelve items in total across the four modules.

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Sleep Disruption

3 items · Likert

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Attention & Focus

3 items · Likert

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Productivity

3 items · Likert

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Emotional Health

3 items · Likert

Two composite scores

DWS and HWS — at a glance.

PAUSE collapses all measurements into two complementary composite scores. Both run 0–100 where higher is healthier, designed for accessible interpretation by non-clinicians without sacrificing the underlying scale-level granularity.

Composite #1

Digital Wellness Score

Blends the six disorder scores (weight 1.0) with the four impact modules (weight 0.5), baseline-subtracted so the scale starts from "no symptoms" rather than the instrument floor.

DWS = (1 − totalRisk / totalMax) × 100

Composite #2

Health Wellness Score

A pure health-impact composite — derived only from the four impact modules (sleep, attention, productivity, emotional health). Inverts the digital-impact proportion so higher = less harm.

HWS = (1 − meanImpact / 4) × 100

Score interpretation

What the numbers mean.

A higher score means healthier digital habits. Bands map composite scores to clear action-oriented guidance — from "very healthy" through "critical patterns detected."

80 – 100

Excellent

Very healthy digital habits.

65 – 79

Good

Mostly healthy with minor concerns.

50 – 64

Moderate Risk

Some habits need attention.

35 – 49

High Risk

Multiple habits affecting wellbeing.

0 – 34

Critical

Significant patterns detected — professional support recommended.

Two ways in

Pick the depth that fits your time.

Whether you have a couple of minutes or a full quarter-hour, PAUSE has an assessment mode that matches. Partial-progress resume is built into the Full Check-up so you can stop and continue within a 24-hour window.

Full Check-up

58 items total ~15 min

All six disorder scales (46 items: CSS-12, BSMAS, SVAS-6, GDT-4, PCUS-11, BWAS) plus the four health-impact modules (12 items in total). Generates both the Digital Wellness Score (DWS) and the Health Wellness Score (HWS), a full area-by-area breakdown, severity classifications, and personalised CBT-based guidance. Resumable if you stop midway.

Single Area

4–12 items ~2 min

Just one scale — for when you already suspect a specific area (gaming, social media, AI use, cyberchondria, etc.) and want a focused screen. Updates that disorder's score without re-running the others.

App tour

Five sections, one platform.

PAUSE is more than a screener — it is a complete digital-wellness platform with assessment, intervention, self-reflection, and progress tracking integrated end-to-end.

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Home

Six wellness areas at a glance with current severity bands and DWS / HWS pills in the header.

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Tools

CBT-based wellness exercises, 4-7-8 breathing timer, daily motivation, weekly summary report.

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Progress

Score history, trend deltas, best-score tracking, area-by-area progress bars, and focus-area suggestions.

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Logbook

Daily journaling with rotating reflection prompts and built-in voice-to-text (speech recognition).

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About

Origin, the six instruments with full references, privacy commitments, and contributor credits.

Results page

One score.
Six readable bands.

After every check-up, PAUSE generates a results page that opens with a single composite number, followed by clear interpretation, then drills down into each disorder's individual severity classification — so users can see at a glance which area needs attention.

The result screen also embeds a five-band reference table, so the score doesn't sit in a vacuum. Users immediately know what 65 means relative to 35 — without needing to memorise cut-offs or consult an external manual.

PAUSE App Digital Wellness Score results screen showing 65 out of 100 (Good) with score breakdown across all six areas and band interpretations

PAUSE App home scrolled down — AI Dependency and Digital Work Addiction severity, plus the 4 Health Impact Areas section and Begin Full Check-up button

Why two scoring layers

Behaviour and impact.

Two people can have identical social-media addiction scores and very different sleep, focus, and emotional health. PAUSE separates the behaviour (six disorder scales) from the impact (four health modules) so the same behaviour can be tracked across people with different downstream consequences.

For research, this design supports both prevalence work (behaviour distributions) and intervention work (does reducing the behaviour improve the impact?).

Engagement layer

Nine achievement badges.

Behaviour-change tools work better when users come back. PAUSE includes a lightweight gamification layer — nine non-monetary achievement badges that reward consistent self-screening, full check-up completion, score improvement, and engagement with the 7-day Detox Challenge.

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First Steps

Completed your first assessment

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Scientist

Completed a Full Check-up

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Digital Clean

Scored 80+ on the Digital Wellness Score

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Week Champion

Completed all 7 detox-challenge days

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Improver

Improved your DWS across check-ups

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On Fire

3 challenge days in a row

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Advocate

Shared your PAUSE results

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Complete Screener

Screened all 6 disorders

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Consistent

3 or more assessments completed

Engineering

Built lean, designed to scale.

PAUSE is engineered as a Progressive Web App with an Android Trusted Web Activity wrapper — one codebase serves the web, mobile browsers, and the Play Store listing. Backend syncing is optional; the app works fully offline against local storage.

Frontend

Vanilla JavaScript PWA

17-module single-page app with no framework or build step. Service worker enables full offline use after the first load. Renders responsively from 360 px upward.

Distribution

Android TWA + Web PWA

Signed Android App Bundle on Google Play Store. Same web app installable directly via "Add to Home Screen" on iOS and Android browsers — without going through any store.

Backend

Supabase (optional)

Local-first storage with optional cloud sync via Supabase Postgres. Users can choose to use PAUSE fully offline with zero account creation, or sync results across devices.

Research basis

Built from the research, not alongside it.

PAUSE grew out of active research in cyberchondria, problematic digital use, and AI-assisted health information seeking among medical students. The CSS-12 instrument anchors two peer-reviewed longitudinal cohort studies currently under review.

The app is built to function not just as a personal self-check, but as a data-collection and screening tool for community-medicine research in low-resource settings — where validated digital instruments are rarely available in a single accessible package.

See research output

Status

Live on Google Play Store

Web: pause.jaideeprao.com

Validated scales

6 peer-reviewed instruments

CSS-12 · BSMAS · SVAS-6 · GDT-4 · PCUS · BWAS

Privacy

Local-first storage

Works fully offline · Optional cloud sync

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Mission

You're part of
something larger.

India has no large-scale data on digital health disorders. None. Every assessment you complete adds a real data point to what will become the first population-level picture of this problem in the country.

A picture that could shape school curricula, workplace policies, and public health guidelines for years to come. One PAUSE check-up at a time.

Could inform

School curricula

Could shape

Workplace policy

Could guide

Public health

Also on iOS

The same web app installs directly on iPhone.

PAUSE is a Progressive Web App. On iOS, open the web version in Safari and use Share → Add to Home Screen — it installs as a standalone app icon, launches full-screen, and works offline just like a native app. No App Store account required.

Try it now

Take your first PAUSE check-up.

Free forever. No ads. No subscription. No account needed for the basic flow. On Android via Play Store, on iOS via Safari ’Add to Home Screen’, or as a web app in any modern browser.

Open in browser

How is your digital life affecting your health?

A measurement tool that didn't exist.

Built on evidence, not opinion.

What PAUSE actually screens for.

Four health impact modules.

DWS and HWS — at a glance.

What the numbers mean.

Pick the depth that fits your time.

Five sections, one platform.

One score. Six readable bands.

Behaviour and impact.

Nine achievement badges.

Built lean, designed to scale.

Vanilla JavaScript PWA

Android TWA + Web PWA

Supabase (optional)

Built from the research, not alongside it.

You're part of something larger.

The same web app installs directly on iPhone.

Take your first PAUSE check-up.

How is your
digital life
affecting your health?

One score.
Six readable bands.

You're part of
something larger.