eHealth in depression
New technologies and media that are transforming our social environment also offer new possibilities for smarter care solutions. Yet so far, innovations in e-health hardly ever move beyond translations of existing practices to digital applications. Most e-health platforms simply digitalize a part of the traditional care scenario.
The ‘Blended 8’ (a consortium of mental healthcare organisations who work together to optimize ehealth) asked us to define a set of design guidelines for meaningful blended care in the treatment of clinical depression. The aim was to truly transform patient behaviour and change the client-clinician relationship in profound ways.
In this project we dived into the nature of depression to be able to design interventions that give new meaning to blended care and that match the way people suffering from depression think and experience the world. One of the key conclusions was that ehealth should address the basic needs for competence, relatedness and autonomy to enhance intrinsic motivation. The resulting set of design guidelines describe how these concerns can be addressed.
