StopAnxiety: tackling anxiety in place

• Autor(a) principal: Ferreira, David da Cruz
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/29536
• topic: Mobile health; User-centered design; Affective computing; Multimodal interaction; Affective modality; Emotionally-aware systemsX; StopAnxiety

Anxiety-related disorders have a strong impact on our quality of life. With their epidemiological prevalence, across the population, highly exceeding the capacity for treatment in health facilities, new ways of delivering therapies are deemed necessary. As such, and with the wide availability of mobile technologies, which consist of a highly accessible and ubiquitous platform, new ways for delivering psychological therapies were made available, fostering, this way, the proposal and development of mobile health (mHealth) systems to support users in managing their anxiety levels. However, although several mobile applications for health support already exist, many of them provide features without evidence-based support of their adequateness and effectiveness and are designed without specifically considering the users’ needs and motivations, resulting, in most cases, in poor adherence, lack of motivation for systematic use, and, additionally, in the possibility of exacerbating the users’ anxious symptomatology. In light of these considerations, and with the need to more closely focus on the needs and motivations of the target users, this dissertation describes the first efforts, integrated in a multidisciplinary usercentered approach, for the development of a system for anxiety management in the academic context. As such, and as the first materialization of this ongoing work, a proof-of-concept application is proposed (StopAnxiety), which was developed by adopting an iterative approach and that already provides a set of clinician-approved anxiety management techniques. In addition to the presented proof-of-concept application, and considering the advantages in interaction contexts, and for the anxiety context in particular, of knowing the users’ emotional states, an improved iteration of a generic affective modality is also presented, resulting from the extension of a previously elaborated work, which should allow, in the future, to explore the consideration of the users’ emotional states to adapt the functioning of the support system, e.g., by proposing anxiety management techniques when the emotional state justifies it.