Here is a sneak peek into Chapter 6 of our new book Digital Therapeutics for Mental Health and Addiction: The State of the Science and Vision for the Future (Elsevier Link):

Receptivity to mobile health interventions

Roman Keller (a,b), Florian v. Wangenheim (a,c), Jacqueline Mair (a,b), Tobias Kowatsch (a,c,d,e)

(a) Future Health Technologies Programme, Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise, Singapore-ETH Centre, Singapore, Singapore, (b) Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore, (c) Centre for Digital Health Interventions, Department of Management, Technology, and Economics, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, (d) Institute for Implementation Science in Health Care, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, (e) School of Medicine, University of St Gallen, St Gallen, Switzerland

Intervention authors can likely increase the effectiveness of mobile health interventions (MHIs) by determining conditions under which individuals are able to receive, process, and use support. In this chapter, we will therefore first introduce and motivate the relevance of receptivity to MHIs. Second, we will describe the anatomy of an “ideal” MHI before key processes involved in the detection and prediction of receptivity to MHIs are discussed. Thereafter, we will review research on receptivity and summarize factors that may carry relevant signals for determining receptive states and thus, offer guidance for the design of receptivity-capable MHIs. We will conclude with challenges intervention authors and engineers face and offer opportunities for future work.