Dartmouth CTBH Workshop on Digital Therapeutics by Tobias Kowatsch, 20 April 2023
Today, Tobias Kowatsch was invited by Prof. Varun Mishra, Core Director of Dartmouth’s CTBH Emerging Technologies & Data Analytics Core) to give a workshop on MobileCoach: A Digital Therapeutics Design & Trial Platform.
Workshop Overview
MobileCoach is an open-source software platform for the design of smartphone-based health interventions and ecological momentary assessments. Since its first release in 2015, MobileCoach-based studies have been conducted in the areas of health literacy in asthma and nutrition, subclinical depression, mindfulness and stress reduction, chronic disease management, physical activity, personality development, chronic pain, childhood obesity, and holistic preventive care.
How to Attend
- Register to join via Zoom
- Attend in-person: CTBH Aquarium Conference Room (46 Centerra Parkway, 3rd Floor, Lebanon, NH)
- RSVP to: Sonia.D.Oren@dartmouth.edu
Objectives of this 2-hour session include…
- Provide an overview of MobileCoach through various MobileCoach-based studies and live demonstrations
- Showcase the design of a digital health intervention with MobileCoach Designer
- Identify and discuss novel requirements for MobileCoach
- Discuss novel research questions and potential collaborations
More About MobileCoach
MobileCoach is a client-server system. On the MobileCoach server, which is written in Java, intervention content (e.g., images, video clips, links to external resources such as websites) and logic (e.g., rules that define when to deliver what intervention or data collection request) are defined via the MobileCoach Designer. The MobileCoach Designer offers a web-based graphical user interface. It also implements a rule-based conversational agent that imitates a conversation with a human being. This conversational agent is then used to deliver the intervention content or ecological momentary assessments via the MobileCoach client applications. Conversational agents allow for building up a working alliance, a vital relationship quality between caregiver and caretaker, that is robustly linked to treatment outcomes. The MobileCoach client applications are written in React Native (https://reactnative.dev) and are available for iOS and Android devices.
MobileCoach can be extended by various other intervention components or data collection mechanisms. These components must be developed according to the specific needs of the envisioned intervention or ecological momentary assessment study.
The MobileCoach team behind this session
Prof. Dr. Tobias Kowatsch, Professor for Digital Health Interventions, Institute for Implementation Science in Health Care, University of Zurich (UZH), Director, School of Medicine, University of St.Gallen (HSG), and Scientific Director, Centre for Digital Health Interventions, UZH, HSG & ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Prabhakaran “Prabhu” Santhanam, MSc in Computer Science, MobileCoach Software Engineer, and Community Manager at the Centre for Digital Health Interventions, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Fabian Schneider, BSc in Computer Science, MobileCoach Software Engineer, and Community Manager at the Centre for Digital Health Interventions, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
