Wickedness in Design for People Diagnosed with Schizophrenia

With the digitisation of society, e-health technology increasingly supports new design situations that extend those traditional to Information Systems, and therefore need to be better understood. In design for complex, new and sensitive design situations, it is not possible to apply known methods and solutions without a deeper situational understanding. These design situations are fraught with wicked problems that are contradictory and complex. This paper intends to answer how the wickedness of the design situation when designing e-health technology for people diagnosed with schizophrenia can be understood and what consequences the design situation has for the design process. The paper presents a grounded theory analysis of stakeholder interviews and focus group interviews with people diagnosed with schizophrenia. Four wicked problems are identified: struggle of dependence, contradiction of social interaction, contradiction of trust and counteracting improvement behaviour. The problems are interrelated and have consequences for the design, acceptance, use and user involvement in design of e-health technology for people diagnosed with schizophrenia. The paper also shows the viability of using grounded theory for studying and describing situational wickedness

IDENTIFYING OPPORTUNITIES FOR FUTURE DESIGN RESEARCH FOR MHEALTH FOR MENTAL HEALTH

Mobile health (mHealth) improves health care by leveraging mobile technology to reach out to patients above and beyond traditional medical interventions. Unfortunately, mHealth progress is still lacking for one of the most prevalent disorders worldwide – depression. mHealth for mental health (mH2) needs to deal with specific challenges such as sensitivity of patient information and traditional nature of conversation-based treatment. Nevertheless, mH2 has the potential to improve care through engaging patients in treatment, providing confidentiality and motivating patients to perform their “homework” in-between therapies. Our research is the first comprehensive study of mH2 applications for depression from one major app store. In this research paper we survey the progress of mH2 for depression by applying and extending a previously developed conceptual framework. We derive research opportunities for designing mHealth for mental health and analyze 124 iPhone applications for depression in order to derive the gaps in their functionality and propose actions for fuller usage of their potential. Consequently we propose a comprehensive analysis method for future design research for mHealth for mental health