After successful completion of the course, students are able to...

1. critically understand the technical, clinical/patient/use challenges of a particular application area (2019WS: mental health promotion)
2. compare existing apps using defined psychological/clinical and technical criteria
3. ground principled design decisions about content (intervention for effectiveness) against psychological/clinical theories, concepts, principles, literature-based evidence as relevant
4. ground principled design decisions about how to encourage use (motivation) against psychological/clinical theories, concepts, principles, literature-based evidence as relevant
5. demonstrate user-centred principles to requirements analysis, concept and design work
6. design a prototype that brings together good principled psychological/clinical intervention design and good technical design
7. describe an appropriate evaluation plan

This course is part of the IT & Health Care module. It explores important basics for the development of an application area in healthcare, motivating design decisions against person/patient needs, clinical aspects, and theories/concepts as relevant (e.g., in areas related to eHealth, mHealth, pHealth).

For this year, the application focus of the course will be applications for promoting health and well being, e.g., for self-care of mental health

The course will cover:

• Introduction to the application domain and open challenges
• Critical analysis of current state of the art (currently available technologies and literature review)
• Introduction to the principles, concepts, theories that can inform design (theories of motivation, behaviour change etc)
• Application to a specific self-care design challenge (including basic requirements gathering, analysis, lo-fi prototyping)

The grading is based on group project work and individual exercises.

Didactical approach: We will take a highly interactive approach to facilitate learning experiences. Lecture content will be interwoven with small group exercises, critical reading of literature, class discussions, and design tasks. There is also substantial group project work.

Note:

• all components of the course have to be passed to achieve a pass mark overall
• a certificate will be issued once the first assessment is handed in

ECTS Breakdown: 3 ECTS = 75 hours

• Introduction to course: 1 hour
• Lectures & sketchnotes/doodles:  10 hours
• Live sessions (activities/discussions): 10 hours
• Individual report, including literature review and experiential app use (task 1): 18 hours
• Group project (task 2): 36 hours

Assignments (and LO=learning outcome]:

1. Task 0: Attendance at live online events (5 events) and sketch notes/doodles from video lectures (5 lectures) [10% - Individual]
2. Task 1: In-depth critical review of existing mental health promotion apps: video/essay [30% - Individual] LO 1,2
3. Task 2: Application design project: design document, poster and prototype/video demo [60% - Group work] LO 3,4,5,6,7