Design and Implementation of a Module to Enable Conditional Content in Internet and Mobile-based Interventions

In 2017 more than 10 percent of the people worldwide were affected from mental health disorders and the number is likely to increase further. Although the recognition of mental disorders increases, the majority remains untreated due to personal reasons of the affected people as well as location or cost factors. A promising approach to overcome these difficulties is the use of Internet- and mobile-based Interventions (IMIs). These have similar results to traditional face-to-face therapies while being able to reduce the problems stated above. Internet- and mobile-based Interventions are used by the Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy (KLIPS) of Ulm University for research purposes. Since existing software systems to create and provide interventions to patients do not meet all requirements of KLIPS, a new system is developed. This thesis focuses on the creation of interventions with a Content Management System (CMS). The main focus lies on the creation of conditional content, meaning further content being dynamically adapted if certain conditions are satisfied. The conditions are defined on basis of questions answered by the patient. By using conditional content the effectiveness of interventions can be increased by tailoring them to the patients’ needs and only showing content that is relevant to a specific patient. The Content Management System is extended by a generic, flexible and understandable module for the creation and preview of conditional content. Since conditions can be of high complexity, a userfriendly graphical editor is developed for the definition of conditions. This makes it possible for domain experts with limited knowledge of the structure of conditions to easily define syntactically correct conditions. Furthermore, the users are supported in defining semantically correct conditions through a test and preview functionality. During the implementation the conditional content module was tested and used by future users of KLIPS to increase understandability and adapt the module to their needs.