DETACH: Authoring Digital Therapeutic Artefacts

We present DETACH, an authoring tool which allows therapists to design and deploy digital artefacts for cognitive behavioral therapy procedures. The system potentiates the creation of mobile applications by choosing screen designs from a limited template set based on existing therapeutic paper forms. Screen transitions can be customized according to patient’s responses. By capitalizing on modern smart-phones’ sensors and features, these transitions can also emerge from external variables such as elapsed time, current user location or user physiological state. The system’s development process followed a user-centered design approach, counting with the clinicians’ valuable feedback in multiple participatory design sessions. In this paper we present the early design stages, clinicians’ requirements, and how these translated into both our low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes. Usability evaluation is still undergoing, with multiple test sessions taking place to guarantee the tool fully adheres to the stakeholders’ expectations.