Therapist-Informed Design Directions for Mobile Assistive Technologies for Anxiety

Anxiety is increasingly becoming a global burden. Although several mobile anxiety assistive technologies have been designed and developed aiming to support the increasing demands, it is not well understood how the design can be improved to aid better regulation outcomes for patients while providing therapists with useful and timely data to make better clinical decisions in assessments and treatments. We explore this area through fifteen interviews with specialist therapists treating anxiety disorders. The uniqueness of this exploration lies in its special attention to therapists’ knowledge on inter-and intra- patient differences in anxiety. This focus enabled the identification of novel therapists-informed, therefore, clinically meaningful customization approaches that could be automated and integrated into the future assistive technologies for anxiety. The therapists’ notion of unintended adverse consequences of envisioned technologies is also revealed and discussed. Overall, this paper contributes to the future design of in-the-moment digital interventions and digital diaries for anxiety, an understudied area in the literature.