Start Date
11-8-2016
Description
This paper addresses the theory-driven design of mobile health (mHealth) applications for improving psychotherapy outcomes. It takes a novel approach, by using information communication technology (ICT) for gathering rich data during the pre-therapy period. Due to severe strain on global healthcare systems, patients often face long waiting periods for psychological treatment. This prolonged waiting is detrimental to patients and it also represents a missed opportunity for collecting data to support the ensuing therapy. In order to provide the theoretical basis for how ICT features can be beneficial during pre-therapy waiting periods, we derive six core requirements that link ICT designs to users’ emotional benefits and to the overall therapeutic outcome quality. We illustrate our approach by applying these requirements to the creation of an mHealth application that supports psychotherapy patients during their waiting for cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). We further present our planned multi-disciplinary field-experiment for testing these design requirements.
Recommended Citation
Neben, Tillmann; Seeger, Anna-Maria; Kramer, Tommi; Knigge, Sophie; White, Andrew J.; Alpers, Georg W.; and Alpers, Georg W., "Make the Most of Waiting: Theory-Driven Design of a Pre-Psychotherapy Mobile Health Application" (2016). AMCIS 2016 Proceedings. 26.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2016/Health/Presentations/26
Make the Most of Waiting: Theory-Driven Design of a Pre-Psychotherapy Mobile Health Application
This paper addresses the theory-driven design of mobile health (mHealth) applications for improving psychotherapy outcomes. It takes a novel approach, by using information communication technology (ICT) for gathering rich data during the pre-therapy period. Due to severe strain on global healthcare systems, patients often face long waiting periods for psychological treatment. This prolonged waiting is detrimental to patients and it also represents a missed opportunity for collecting data to support the ensuing therapy. In order to provide the theoretical basis for how ICT features can be beneficial during pre-therapy waiting periods, we derive six core requirements that link ICT designs to users’ emotional benefits and to the overall therapeutic outcome quality. We illustrate our approach by applying these requirements to the creation of an mHealth application that supports psychotherapy patients during their waiting for cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). We further present our planned multi-disciplinary field-experiment for testing these design requirements.