Validating and Dialectical Coaching Strategies in a Virtual Coach for Obese Emotional Eaters 65 3 3 | Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMA) Ecological Momentary Assessments are applied to systematically collect data about daily experience and feelings of the users, as well as the context of use, for instance, through a user-friendly smartphone application. Experience sampling is widely used in daily psychiatry practice [30-31], allowing to measure and record encountered feelings and emotions through mHealth applications in real time. The Virtual Coach sends out a daily message via the built-in timeline, or via WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger inviting the user to log in into the application to answer just one question: “Did you have cravings or binges today, in the last 24 hours?” As soon as she answers that question with a “yes”, she will be redirected to the emo.analyser. Approach and methodology Before starting developing a prototype of the above-mentioned modules and functions, more research is needed to find out how the the target group experiences the validating and dialectical coaching strategies. That is why we put up an experimental study design first. For this vignette study – described under A | Vignettes study – we designed a low- fidelity concept of the virtual coach to evaluate validating and dialectical strategies with target users. This concept version lacks the functionality of the emo.analyser and the conversational functionalities. Next step will be building a working prototype of the emo.analyser. The functional criteria, as drawn up along the lines of the Behaviour Chain Analysis [8, pp.57-58,75] from the Dialectical Behaviour Therapy will then be coupled with the outcomes of the vignette study, being the ratified coaching strategies. A | Vignettes study In the design of this experimental study, participants are presented with scenarios describing the daily life of a persona [8]. A persona is a fictional representation of the target group of emotional eaters. The persona experiences the very same negative emotions and also encounters food cravings that can lead to binge eating. The realistic scenarios are based on validated personas [9]. The depicted circumstances in the vignettes [33-35] will appeal to the emotions and feelings of the participants in the study. See Figure 5. Three different coaching strategies are presented at random to the participants: 1. Validating response, 2. Confronting or dialectical response, or 3. A combination of a validating and a dialectical response.
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