Measuring and fostering engagement with mental health e-coaches

Abstract

Mental health e-coaches and technology-delivered services are showing considerable benefits to foster mental health literacy, monitor symptoms, favour self-management of different mental health conditions and scaffold positive behaviours. However, adherence to these systems is usually low and generally declines over time. There exists a recent body of work addressing engagement with mental health technology with the aim to understand the factors that influence sustained use and inform the design of systems that are able to generate sufficient engagement to attain their expected results. This paper explores the different facets of engagement in mental health e-coaches, including aspects related to the estimation of system use from log data, effective engagement, user experience, motivation, incentives, user expectations, peer support and the specific challenges of technologies addressed to mental health.