What does psychology and psychiatry need from mobile systems: an end-user perspective

Over the past two decades, a growing body of research in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) has been accumulated using computer-assisted infield methods to assess self-report data, physiological data as well as environmental aspects of BPD patients in everyday life situations. In psychological and psychiatric research, the assessment method uniting all these aspects of assessment has been coined "Ambulatory Assessment". This method combines many advantages besides real-life and real-time assessment, e.g. objective and unobtrusive assessments as well as assessments of setting- or context-specificities. A seminal field of application is the use of electronic devices as therapeutic tools, giving interactive feedback to patients, i.e. providing interventions at the very moments when patients are most in need of additional support. By giving two examples of BPD diagnostic criteria, we outline the key technical needs in order to take the use of sensor technology in psychological research and therapy to a higher level. The following key technical needs have been identified: (1) tools for emotion detection providing an objective measure of current emotional states; (2) tools for identifying persons; (3) tools for detecting instances of self-destructive behavior like alcohol or drug use or speeding/reckless-driving; (4) tools for integrating and analyzing information of various sensors in order to give automated feedback to the patient in real time. In a nutshell, even though Ambulatory Assessment has been successfully used in BPD research over the past few years, the method may offer many more options of applications in research and even more in therapy. However, psychologists and psychiatrists lack the technological knowledge to realize possible new applications of Ambulatory Assessment. In order to increase the usefulness of Ambulatory Assessment in psychological research and therapy, multidisciplinary teams, including technology experts as well as clinical psychologists, are clearly needed.