Regaining Joy of Life: Theory-Driven Development of Mobile Psychotherapy Support Systems

This paper addresses the theory-driven design of a mobile health (mHealth) application that supports modern psychotherapy with information communication technology (ICT). It presents the initial stage of a larger multi-disciplinary project involving researchers from clinical psychology and information systems (IS). We derive guidelines for developing ICT that support cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), a form of psychotherapy that is well established for the treatment of several mental disorders such as anxiety disorders and post-traumatic stress disorders. Furthermore, we identify core challenges of CBT that can be mitigated with ICT support: patient compliance with therapy homework as well as relapse prevention. These challenges are linked to the theoretical constructs of motivation and continued use intention. As a first step of our multi-disciplinary research-in-progress, we derive five principles and 14 guidelines for the design of an mHealth application supporting CBT before implementing and testing it within our research cluster.