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Design and Evaluation of a Mobile Chat App for the Open Source Behavioral Health Intervention Platform MobileCoach

2017; Springer Science+Business Media; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-319-59144-5_36

1611-3349

Tobias Kowatsch, Dirk Volland, Iris Shih, Dominik Rüegger, Florian Künzler, Filipe Barata, Andreas Filler, Dirk Büchter, Björn Brogle, Katrin Heldt, Pauline Gindrat, Nathalie J. Farpour‐Lambert, Dagmar l’Allemand,

Innovative Human-Technology Interaction

The open source platform MobileCoach (mobile-coach.eu) has been used for various behavioral health interventions in the public health context. However, so far, MobileCoach is limited to text message-based interactions. That is, participants use error-prone and laborious text-input fields and have to bear the SMS costs. Moreover, MobileCoach does not provide a dedicated chat channel for individual requests beyond the processing capabilities of its chatbot. Intervention designers are also limited to text-based self-report data. In this paper, we thus present a mobile chat app with pre-defined answer options, a dedicated chat channel for patients and health professionals and sensor data integration for the MobileCoach platform. Results of a pretest (N = 11) and preliminary findings of a randomized controlled clinical trial (N = 14) with young patients, who participate in an intervention for the treatment of obesity, are promising with respect to the utility of the chat app.