Design and evaluation of a mobile chat app for the open source behavioral health intervention platform mobilecoach - Kowatsch, T.; Volland, D.; Shih, I.; Rüegger, D.; Künzler, F.; Barata, F.; Filler, A.; Büchter, D.; Brogle, B.; Heldt, K.; Gindrat, P.; Farpour-Lambert, N.; et al.
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. © Springer International Publishing AG 2017.
Keywords: conferencePaper