Visualization and visual analytics of geospatial data for psychological treatment

Abstract

Current location-tracking solutions, along with general advances in software (e.g., development frameworks, visualization libraries) and hardware (e.g., cloud computing, mobile devices), make it increasingly easy to capture and store geospatial data to be exploited in various application areas. In this dissertation, we study the possibilities of visualization techniques and visual analytics of geospatial (user) data with the aim of helping/improving therapies in the realm of psychological health. To this aim, a web-based visualization application was created as part of a larger ecosystem of applications created by GEOTEC, including a mobile app to systematically capture user’s geospatial data (i.e., GPS coordinates), and a metrics analytical platform, which is capable of storing captured data and performing useful analysis/calculations. The visualization tool was developed to support therapists to make informed decisions pertinent to psychological illness depression interventions, by allowing them to visually inspect, compare, and analyze captured and processed data from monitored patients. Next to determining what visual elements of the visualization tool best suited the needs of the case study, a quantitative and qualitative evaluation was performed with therapists, in order to measure the resulting usefulness of the tool, find out the drawbacks for further improvement, and to generate ideas for future work and further applications in psychological health. As a result, the visualization tool was generally found to be useable (SUS score of 86.5625), useful for therapists to help during and to determine their therapy, and various useful extensions and further application areas were discovered. Based on the result, we can conclude that the tool may indeed become a beneficial mechanism for psychological intervention in real-world settings.