Project Highlight: Mobile Therapy, Using MyExperience for Emotional Self-Awareness

Figure 1. Patients could self-report their mood

Dr. Margaret Morris from the Digital Health Group at Intel and colleagues from Oregon Health and Sciences and Columbia University recently published a paper entitled Mobile Therapy: Case Study Evaluations of a Cell Phone Application for Emotional Self-Awareness in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. They used the MyExperience tool for mood reporting and therapeutic exercises mediated by the mobile phone.

Here's a snippet from their abstract:

Background: Emotional awareness and self-regulation are important skills for improving mental health and reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease. Cognitive behavioral therapy can teach these skills but is not widely available.

Objective: This exploratory study examined the potential of mobile phone technologies to broaden access to cognitive behavioral therapy techniques and to provide in-the-moment support.

Methods: We developed a mobile phone application with touch screen scales for mood reporting and therapeutic exercises for cognitive reappraisal (ie, examination of maladaptive interpretations) and physical relaxation. The application was deployed in a one-month field study with eight individuals who had reported significant stress during an employee health assessment. Participants were prompted via their mobile phones to report their moods several times a day on a Mood Map—a translation of the circumplex model of emotion—and a series of single-dimension mood scales. Using the prototype, participants could also activate mobile therapies as needed. During weekly open-ended interviews, participants discussed their use of the device and responded to longitudinal views of their data. Analyses included a thematic review of interview narratives, assessment of mood changes over the course of the study and the diurnal cycle, and interrogation of this mobile data based on stressful incidents reported in interviews.

Figure 2. The MyExperience tool was also used for mobile cognitive therapy interventions. Here a glowing blue circle is animated to help a patient breathe in and out slowly.

Note that we featured Dr. Morris' work once before with the Mobile Heart Health post.

MyExperience at Measuring Behavior 2010

MyExperience will be discussed during a mini-workshop at Measuring Behavior 2010, the 7th International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral Research in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Details below:

Organizer

Jürgen Stumpp (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany)

Aim of the meeting

In this user meeting we will show an overview of hand-held computer software solutions for psychological and behavioral monitoring. With this user meeting we want to provide a forum in which we can discuss the open-source MyExperience software as a solution for Psychological and Behavioral Monitoring. MyExperience is a context-aware data collection platform for capturing objective and subjective data as it is experienced. The MyExperience project was started by Intel Research, Seattle and the University of Washington in the spring of 2005. During the last year we ported the Platform to newer mobile phones and made several improvements and extensions which we would like to discuss with the participants. We would like to know if MyExperience fits the needs of the researchers in the field of behavioral monitoring and want to discuss further developments of MyExperience.

Program

We would like to do a small presentation on how MyExperience works and how it can help researchers in different fields to do studies with it. Also we would like to show how we improved MyExperience to be a complete solution for behavioral monitoring. We will bring a functional prototype that demonstrates the current development state and how MyExperience can be used in combination with mobile sensors that monitor physiological signals and triggers questionnaires on the hand-held computer.

(link)