Considerations for Designing Context-Aware Mobile Apps for Mental Health Interventions

Abstract

This work identifies major areas of knowledge and proposes a set of relevant dimensions by area that must be taken into account in the design and delivery of context-aware mobile applications for mental health interventions. We argue that much of the related research has focused only on a few dimensions, paying little or no attention to others and, most importantly, to potential relationships between them. Our belief is that the improvement of the effectiveness of mobile interventions to support mental health necessarily implies that developers and therapists comprehensively consider the interaction between the proposed dimensions. Taking as a starting point the three areas of knowledge (Technology, Context, and Mental Health), we re-examine each area to identify relevant dimensions, discuss the relationships between them and finally draw a series of considerations. The resulting considerations can help therapists and developers to devise, design, and generate custom mobile applications in a way that increases the motivation and engagement of patients and, therefore, the effectiveness of psychological treatments.

Adaptive Strategies for Patient Monitoring in Mobile Health Applications

“…Contextual information can also be used to send feedback to the patient, to a caregiver, or to the medical staff when an anomaly is detected. The detection of anomalies can be performed directly on the device worn by the patient via embedded data processing [7], [8], [9], or data can be transferred to the cloud first, where important computing resources can be mobilized for data analysis [10].…”

Analysis and Development of a Platform for Generating Context-Aware Apps for Mental Health

“…Once the communication framework was set up, a focus group followed to set out the needs and requirements of the platform and tools (see details in [300]). In the focus group eight psychologists from the LABPSITEC group were involved.…”

“…Once defined, these functional requirements were interpreted in the realm of the design considerations stated in Miralles & Granell [300]. In that work, three major areas of knowledge along with their relevant dimensions were discussed (Table 4.1).…”

“…Besides the issue of adherence, a second problem in the current wave of mobile device-based interventions is a lack of use of location analysis and locationbased technology [300]. Location-based games, also known as location-aware games [301] or geogames [302], are games whose mechanics involve georeferenced elements and resources, i.e.…”

“…Built on previous work where a set of considerations for designing contextaware mobile application for mental health interventions were discussed [300], the objective of this work is the design and development of a platform to allow health professionals to create, in a simple and intuitive way, mobile applications for the treatment of depression. The generated mobile apps are able to include gamification techniques to improve adherence and also take advantage of patient's position and location analysis to promote behavioral activation.…”