Internet-delivered Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (iCBT) is an effective treatment for depression and anxiety disorders. However longitudinal qualitative research into the client's subjective experience of this form of treatment 'in the wild' is relatively scarce. We present an analysis of secondary outcomes in a naturalistic RCT conducted within the UK's Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme. We evaluated clients' expectations, experience, and context of usage of iCBT, across three timepoints. Results are discussed in terms of the creation of a therapeutic space online, the impact of hope, expectations and personal factors on the therapeutic experience, iCBT as "therapy on the go" and developing skills for life. While iCBT on the whole provides a positive, supportive and therapeutic experience for clients, the study identified managing expectations, polarized preferences, momentary help-seeking and long-term support as important aspects of the experience to consider in future design.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376254
In this paper, we explore the use of virtual reality (VR) in assisting individuals who self-injure. Past work on self-injury in HCI has focused almost exclusively on mobile applications and message boards. As VR systems become more common, it is worth exploring what unique affordances of the technology can be leveraged to support self-injury reduction and cessation. Research on VR intervention and self-injury treatment informed the design of three novel virtual reality experiences. Nineteen interviews were conducted with individuals with current, or a past history of, self-injury with the goals of uncovering overall impressions of the perceived efficacy of VR with this population, as well as better understanding key mechanisms which impact their experience. Our analysis reveals four key elements common across all experiences: transportation, embodiment, immersion/distraction, and sense of control, and additional themes within each unique experience. We discuss the implications of these findings for future intervention design.
Impaired social functioning is a symptom of mental illness (e.g., depression, schizophrenia) and a wide range of other conditions (e.g., cognitive decline in the elderly, dementia). Today, assessing social functioning relies on subjective evaluations and self assessments. We propose a different approach and collect detailed social functioning measures and objective mobile sensing data from N=55 outpatients living with schizophrenia to study new methods of passively accessing social functioning. We identify a number of behavioral patterns from sensing data, and discuss important correlations between social function sub-scales and mobile sensing features. We show we can accurately predict the social functioning of outpatients in our study including the following sub-scales: prosocial activities (MAE = 7.79, r = 0.53), which indicates engagement in common social activities; interpersonal behavior (MAE = 3.39, r = 0.57), which represents the number of friends and quality of communications; and employment/occupation (MAE = 2.17, r = 0.62), which relates to engagement in productive employment or a structured program of daily activity. Our work on automatically inferring social functioning opens the way to new forms of assessment and intervention across a number of areas including mental health and aging in place.
Research in personal informatics (PI) calls for systems to sup- port social forms of tracking, raising questions about how privacy can and should support intentionally sharing sensitive health information. We focus on the case of personal data related to the self-tracking of bipolar disorder (BD) in order to explore the ways in which disclosure activities intersect with other privacy experiences. While research in HCI of- ten discusses privacy as a disclosure activity, this does not reflect the ways in which privacy can be passively experienced. In this paper we broaden conceptions of privacy by defining transparency experiences and contributing factors in contrast to disclosure activities and preferences. Next, we ground this theoretical move in empirical analysis of personal narratives shared by people managing BD. We discuss the resulting emer- gent model of transparency in terms of implications for the design of socially-enabled PI systems. CAUTION: This paper contains references to experiences of mental illness, including self-harm, depression, suicidal ideation, etc.
The representation of sounds derived from everyday life can be beneficial for people with dementia by evoking memories and emotional responses. Despite this potential, integrating sound and sound-based interventions in care facilities has not received much research attention. In this paper, we present the findings from a field study that explored the responses of 19 people with advanced dementia to a selection of everyday sounds presented to them in a care home and the role of these responses in the care environment. To study this, we deployed Vita, a 'pillow-like' sound player, in two dementia care facilities for four weeks, during which observations were recorded. Afterwards, we conducted interviews with caregivers who used Vita in everyday care practice. Our findings reveal how everyday sounds provided by Vita stimulated meaningful conversation, playfulness, and connection between residents and caregivers. Furthermore, we propose design implications for integrating everyday sounds in dementia care.