CopeDiary:
Case Study of Adapting a Phone-based Support System to Enable Drug- dependent Patients to Develop Coping Skills
Ya-Fang Avon Lin, Cheng-Yuan Kelvin Li, Yanina Kalinicheva, Ming-Chyi Huang,
Chao-Hui Lee, Hao-Chuan Wang, Hao-Hua Chu
Overview
CopeDiary is a phone-based sensing and feedback system, designed to help Ketamine dependents obtain, maintain, and practice coping skills for dealing with high-risk situations, thereby preventing drug relapse.
CopeDiary encourages and guides Ketamine dependents to come up with coping skills and implement these skills to defend the triggers of drug-seeking cravings. This system also involved therapists to educate and assist patients in conducting cognitive behavioral therapy. The drug user can record an event when encountering a trigger and its corresponding coping skills in the app. Then, the app ranks the user’s triggers and shows a therapist's feedbacks toward his or her coping skills.
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Through conducting a two-month real-world user testing on three recovering drug-dependent patients, we revealed design-related challenges regarding how to engage drug-dependent patients and therapists about learning and teaching coping strategies for daily life.
My Role
In this work, I contributed to the main concept of self-monitoring and reflecting triggers and coping skills instead of merely monitoring drug use.
In the beginning, I coordinated with therapists to embed cognitive behavioral therapy into CopeDiary and teamed with two other researchers to identify system design goals. Then I converted these goals into wireframes and conducted usability testing to modify the design. I was also in charge of visual design.
Finally, I designed and performed a two-month field study with three drug-dependent patients and three therapists. I also analyzed the study results.