JoinTS

(2005-06). JoinTS – Joint psychological Therapy Support. Financed by FCT (Programa Operacional Sociedade e Informação – Projecto POSI/EIA/62473/2004). National project. Participants: FCUL.

For specific problems, current psychological therapy methods build on patient agency, autonomy, activity and selfregulation, away from the therapist office. At the therapy office consultation, the patient is given tasks to accomplish during his daily activities. Those tasks ought to be registered by the patient, along with reports of state of mind, thoughts, among others. Within this scenario information flows among actors (patients and clinicians) that move through different settings. Therapists organize tasks, forms and fields, at home or at the consultation setting, specifically for each patient or group. Forms are passed to patients that fill them, wherever, and return them to the therapist. The therapist integrates the filled forms with orally gathered data and previous knowledge, analyzes it and annotates it. Apart from this therapist/patient cooperation, two other dimensions can also be visualized: collaboration among therapists and among patients (group therapy). This new magnitudes further emphasizes the information exchange needs, its promptness requirements and the co-referencing and annotation easiness. Clearly this whole process, currently mainly supported by paper, causes coding, tracking, communication and organization problems, and most of all wastes clinician and patient time. The use of computer support can overcome some of these difficulties. Currently, software is available and used for data gathering, analysis, visualization, etc. Specific psychology software allows patients to follow some methods of therapy, including data gathering. Some of these use desktop based approaches which are incompatible with most of the previously described scenarios, including office consultation. Hand-held solutions are usually very simplistic, with yes-no questions that hardly fill the needs. Integration among actors, particularly in the large collaboration scenarios, and the multiple settings are barely offered and clinician adjustment of patient tasks and forms is not even considered. The project’s main objective is to provide adequate computational support to this joint therapy approach. As such, it complements and ongoing project, SCOPE, which focus on psychological diagnosis, covering most of therapist tools. The JoinTS project will extent the therapist platform to a collaborative one and will introduce the ability to create and organize patient forms on desktop and consultation setting (TabletPC/PDA). On the patients´ side, not covered by SCOPE, the JoinTS project will provide tools with adequate interfaces and devices (PDA, Smartphone), enabling the patient to pursue his therapy at any time or place, either by registering valuable information or by communicating promptly with his therapist, or among patients, whenever needed. These scenarios can be further enhanced including the monitoring of some physiologic patient characteristics that send alerts to the patient’s therapist when emergencies occur.

Project’s Documentation

Papers (supported by the project)

Zurita, G., P. Antunes, N. Baloian, L. Carriço and F. Baytelman (forthcoming) “Using PDAs in Meetings: Patterns, Architecture and Components.” Journal of Universal Computer Science, to appear. Special issue on Groupware: Issues and Applications . ISI impact factor in 2006: 0.338. Number of papers in 2006: 94.

Zurita, G., P. Antunes, L. Carriço, F. Baytelman, M. Sá and N. Baloian (2006) Analyzing the Roles of PDA in Meeting Scenarios. Groupware: Design, Implementation, and Use. 12th International Workshop, CRIWG 2006, Medina Del Campo, Spain, September 2006 Proceedings. Y. Dimitriadis, I. Zigurs and E. Gómez-Sanchéz. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 4154, pp. 364-380. Heidelberg, Springer-Verlag. Full paper acceptance ratio: 21%.http://www.di.fc.ul.pt/~paa/papers/criwg-06-pda.pdf

Carriço, L., P. Antunes, M. Sá, J. Reis, A. Henriques and A. Carvalho (2006). Mobile Devices for Active Psychoterapy. Proceedings of the IADIS International Applied Computing Conference, San Sebastian, Spain. http://www.di.fc.ul.pt/~paa/papers/2006iadisAP-scope.pdf.

 

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