Abstract
Anxiety-related disorders have a strong impact on our quality of life. With their epidemiological prevalence, across the population, highly exceeding the capacity for treatment in health facilities, new ways of delivering therapies are needed. The wide availability of mobile technologies, e.g., smartphones, has provided an accessible and ubiquitous platform for delivering psychological therapies and many mobile health (mHealth) systems have been proposed to support users in managing their levels of anxiety. However, many of the available tools provide features without evidence-based support of their adequateness and effectiveness. Furthermore, several tools are designed without specifically considering the users’ needs and motivations, resulting in poor adherence or a lack of motivation for systematic use, hindering any positive effects.
Considering the need to more closely focus on the motivations of the target users, this article describes how the efforts of a multidisciplinary team are contributing to support a user-centred approach to design and develop a tool to support anxiety management in the context of an Academic Campus. As a first materialization of this ongoing work, a proof-of-concept application is proposed (StopAnxiety), developed by adopting an iterative approach, and already providing a set of clinician-approved anxiety management techniques.
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Acknowledgements
This work is partially funded by IEETA Research Unit funding (UID/CEC/00127/2019), by Portugal 2020 under the Competitiveness and Internationalization Operational Program, and the European Regional Development Fund through project SOCA – Smart Open Campus (CENTRO-01-0145-FEDER-000010).
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Ferreira, D., Melo, D., Santo, A., Silva, P., Soares, S.C., Silva, S. (2020). Stop Anxiety: Tackling Anxiety in the Academic Campus Through an mHealth Multidisciplinary User-Centred Approach. In: O'Hare, G., O'Grady, M., O’Donoghue, J., Henn, P. (eds) Wireless Mobile Communication and Healthcare. MobiHealth 2019. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 320. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49289-2_9
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