Chapter 5 154 2. Current study This study describes an attempt to develop and apply a scientifically grounded approach when designing and implementing an mHealth e-coaching app. It is part of a project called “Sense-IT” in which the ultimate goal is to design an effective and efficient mHealth e-coaching intervention that can help BPD patients with low emotional awareness to learn to better recognize and monitor their own emotional arousal. The study, as is the larger project, is grounded in a ‘design science’ paradigm [51, 52]. Design science, as opposed to ‘natural science’, is a form of prescriptive rather than descriptive research [51, 52]. “Whereas natural science tries to understand reality, design science attempts to create things that serve human purposes (p.253)” [51]. The mission of design science is to develop knowledge for the design and realization of artefacts (i.e., to solve construction problems) or to be used in the improvement of the performance of existing entities (i.e., to solve improvement problems) [52]. Within the design science paradigm, thorough understanding of the environment in which the product is going to be implemented is deemed essential. Proper adapting of knowledge from referent disciplines is seen as “extremely fruitful” [51]. Optimal academic research in design science thus would combine description-driven and prescription driven research. [52]. However, the paradigm of design science holds that the ultimate goal is to ‘create’ or ‘develop’. This design study builds on the premises of User Experience Design. It utilizes a user centered, participatory design. mHealth – short for ‘mobile health’ - is defined here as ‘the practice of eHealth, assisted by smartphones which captures, analyses, processes, and transmits healthbased information from sensors and other biomedical systems [53]. To do so, the proposed coaching application will utilize mobile biosensor technology. Biosensors are used to process, analyze, register and interpret information and are usually attached to the user’s body. Advances in mobile sensor technology allow for relatively easy measurement of physiological changes of clients in many situations in an unobtrusive way [54]. “Equipped with cutting-edge sensing technology and highend processors, smartphones [and other smart-devices] are able to unobtrusively identify human emotions and are an ideal platform for delivering feedback and behavioral therapy in an ‘‘all the time everywhere’’ pervasive computing model… Wireless wearable biosensors [such as found in smartwatches] can be used for measuring physiological signals, such as electrodermal activity, heart rate, temperature, and respiratory rate. Information gathered from these sensors can be used to make inferences about peoples’ states of affect” [55]. Empirical findings in psychophysiology provide evidence of a relationship between physiological reactions and emotional/affective states of humans [39]. Physiological,
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