Mobile Support for Personalized Therapies OminSCOPE: Richer Artefacts and Data Collection Marco de Sa LaSIGE & University of Lisbon Campo-Grande, 1749-016, Lisboa, Portugal marcosa@dLfc.ul.pt Abstract - this paper presents OmniSCOPE, an environment for the development of mobile pervasive therapy artefacts. OmniSCOPE builds on SCOPE, a tool for the support of mobile psychotherapy. Given the positive results that emerged through the development and utilisation of SCOPE, extensions were developed in order to enhance the artefacts, the data collection by patients and its consequent analysis by therapists. These extend the usage possibilities to new situations and therapies also targeting a wider range of users. We detail the extensions and how they support new activities and therapies illustrated by three case studies in which they are being currently evaluated. We describe initial results and discuss future trends and directions. Keywords-mobile devices; paper-based artefacts; personalized therapy. I. INTRODUCTION The introduction of mobile technology within therapeutic practices, in support of several activities, has proved to provide beneficial results for both therapists and patients. For patients, the ability to carry therapeutic artefacts (e.g., tutorials, questionnaires, procedures) without location restrictions and directly on their personal devices brings a set of advantages that range from the easiness to use several artefacts on a single device up to the possibility of obtaining information and pervasive therapy support [14]. On the other hand, for therapists, it offers the opportunity to extend their presence outside therapies, means to enhance the traditional paper-based artefacts and, more importantly, the ability to collect patient data through seamless and comprehensive methods. These advantages are, however, restrained by the usual lack of personalization, richness of interactivity and broadness of content, which can be found in other, more powerful, platforms. In general, mobile therapy tools are highly specific and focused on singular activities (e.g., register number of cigarettes smoked during a day; register thoughts; self- assessment tests) or disorders (e.g., anxiety, depression, obesity, pain related issues) [14][12][7]. Contrastingly, desktop and web-oriented tools offer richer experiences [3][12], configurable access and support to a wider set of problems, especially given the use of multimedia content. On the other hand, they fail to provide the pervasive therapy means that characterise mobile tool's efficiency and the degree of individuality and personalization that is often required for some types of therapy. Clearly, this gap between mobility and richness of interactivity, personalization and scope of existing tools open opportunities for new systems that combine the Digital Object Identifier: 10.41 OB/ICST. PERVASIVEHEAL TH2009. 6013 http://dx.doi.org/10.41OBIICST.PERVASIVEHEALTH2009. 6013 Luis Carrico LaSIGE & University of Lisbon Campo-Grande, 1749-016, Lisboa, Portugal Imc@dLfc.ul.pt advantages of both desktop and mobile tools and urge for new approaches. SCOPE [14] is a software framework that offers some of the abovementioned features, including tools that support 1) the construction and adjustment of specific therapeutic artefacts for psychotherapy (e.g., questionnaires and registries for cognitive behavioural therapy - CBT); 2) their utilization by patients on mobile devices; and 3) the collection of questionnaire and form completion and usage data. Through the experiences of its application to CBT, it has provided very positive results. The added benefits that it has introduced were clearly demonstrated by user preference when compared with the paper-based counterparts and by the detection of issues that were previously unnoticed when using the traditional approach. Nevertheless, SCOPE still fails to provide a generic approach that can be applied to different disorders. It covers only psychotherapy artefacts and CBT procedures, neglecting every other health care domain that can benefit from this type of pervasive therapy support. Moreover, the absence of rich visual and multimedia content retracts from its ability to be used for more interactive, complex and demanding therapy approaches that require content other than textual and pictorial based. Accordingly, and building on the initial results and both therapist and patient opinions, new extensions and features were envisioned and have been added to the framework. These focus, in particular, the extension of SCOPE's broadness in terms of patient support, offering new and richer artefacts that cover different issues, targeting new domains and new users. Additionally, new means to support data collection and deeper analysis techniques have also been included. As a collateral result, besides extending it to new domains, it now also supports its utilisation by users with disabilities, which are, frequently, those more prone to require therapy. This paper presents OmniSCOPE, a framework that extends SCOPE, addressing these issues and offering enhancements to the entire process. As its greatest contribution over existing and previous work it presents the data collection additions and the richness of the new created artefacts. Furthermore, it explains how it SCOPE's effectiveness and positive impact were extended into other therapies that require ubiquitous and pervasive data collection by patients and extensive therapy outside the office, as well as its access to disabled users. II. RELATED WORK The quick evolution of technology has promoted its inclusion within a wide set of our society's activities and domains. In