Connecting addicted patients and therapists based on GPS for providing context-aware notification

Abstract

Smartphones have now become a device that everyone uses in day to day activities. Moreover, thanks to their built-in sensors, they can successfully determine the user’s location, perceive the real-world and act upon those stimuli. In the previous years, a location-based and context-aware platform to support the treatment of patients with psychological disorders was developed at GEOTEC, a Spanish research group in Geospatial technologies. This platform consists of a mobile application that monitors the patient’s behavior and delivers interventions, and a web-based application that allows therapists to define and steer the monitoring and intervention process. Concretely, the platform tracks the users location and visualizes it for the therapist. This thesis proposes an extension to the Symptoms platform, in two ways: to allow location- and time-based triggered questionnaires, to further assess the patients psychological state in-situ and in real time, and to extend the current location-based notifications system to use the same context—based triggers to further assist psychotherapeutic interventions. To this aim, the Symptoms administration web application is extended to allow therapists to create extended context-based triggers (e.g., based on time/duration and location), to be used to trigger questionnaires (assessment) and notification (treatment). Furthermore, the web application is extended to collect, store and visualize the feedback sent by the patients to support therapists to make informed decisions. Next to the web application for therapists, the Symptoms mobile app is also extended to allow notifications and questionnaires to be displayed (when context conditions are met), and responded to by the patient. The proposed extensions are evaluated both technical and regarding usage (usefulness, usability). As a result, the mobile app and web-based application were found to be usable with SUS score of 86.75 and 75 respectively. The web app is found to be useful for the therapists to help assess and treat patients, and better understand patient’s behavior.