Developing a smartphone App based on the Unified Protocol for the transdiagnostic treatment of emotional disorders: A qualitative analysis of users and professionals' perspectives

Abstract

Emotional Disorders have become the most prevalent mental disorders in the world. In relation to their high prevalence, mental health care from public health services faces major challenges. Consequently, finding solutions to deliver cost-effective evidence-based treatments has become a main goal of today's clinical psychology. Smartphone apps for mental health have emerged as a potential tool to deal with it. However, despite their effectiveness and advantages, several studies suggest the need to involve patients and professionals in the design of these apps from the first stage of the development process. Thus, this study aimed to identify, from both a group of users and professionals, the needs, opinions, expectations and design aspects of a future smartphone app based in the Unified Protocol (UP), that will allow to develop the subsequent technical work of the app engineers. Two focus groups were conducted, one with 7 professionals and the other with 9 users, both groups familiar with the UP. A thematic content analysis based in grounded theory was performed in order to define emergent categories of analysis derived from the interview data. The results revealed 8 common topics in both focus groups and 5 specific key topics were identified in the professionals' focus group. Of the total proposals, 93 % of the professionals' and 78 % of the users' are implemented in the preliminary version of the app.

Keywords: EDs, Emotional Disorders; Emotional disorders; NHS, National Health System; PDAs, personal digital assistants; PMHC, Public Mental Health Center; Qualitative methods; Smartphone app; Thematic content analysis; UCD, User-Centered Design; UP, Unified Protocol; Unified protocol; m-Health.

Fig. 1

Functionalities integrated in the app extracted from focus group.