JOINTS
Addressing Group Psychotherapy Requirements
Luís Duarte, Luís Carriço, Marco de Sá and Diogo Luís
LaSIGE & Department of Informatics, Faculty of Sciences
University of Lisbon
Edifício C6 Campo Grande, Lisboa, Portugal
Keywords: Psychotherapy, CSCW, Mobile Devices, Public Displays.
Abstract: Providing computational support to group meetings is a challenge some applications are now addressing.
Nonetheless, there are specific areas which need special attention by developers to cover all inherent issues,
which can reveal themselves as workflow, interface or context requirements, among other. In the group
psychotherapy field of study it is necessary to be careful with both the therapist’s and the patient’s work,
providing both groups with the necessary mechanisms, interfaces and tools to accomplish their tasks. This
poster presents a project whose main goal is to address all this challenges in group psychotherapy sessions.
1 INTRODUCTION
Activities which require some collaboration are part
of our daily lives. In some cases these can be defined
as mere extensions of their individual counterparts
However, when we dwell into more specific areas,
new challenges can rise which were not foreseen and
therefore need to be accounted for (Brignull, 2004).
JoinTS (Joint psychological Therapy Support) is
a project which addresses the problems and
challenges of group psychotherapy. Individual
psychotherapy, although less challenging than the
group version, already requires different forms of
interaction between therapist and patient. The
therapy process includes a series of meetings in
which both actors exchange information both by
conversations and paper artifacts (Mahoney, 2003).
As other collaborative activities, group
psychotherapy can be defined as an extension of
individual therapy, supporting not only all the
activities performed on the individual counterpart
but also bringing several new issues to the process:
an increased number of participants and consequent
increased amount of exchanged and processed data;
the presence (in some occasions) of a second
therapist; the management of different
communication channels (therapist-therapist and
therapist-patients); easy and quick way to retrieve /
distribute data from / to patients.
Project JoinTS aims at delivering computational
support to all these activities, enhancing the group
therapy process and providing therapists with the
appropriate tools to perform their tasks.
2 JOINTS
The traditional group psychotherapy scenario is
characterized for having a therapist (who leads the
session), a group of patients and, occasionally, a
second therapist (who acts as an observer towards
the group). The main therapist conducts the session
as a facilitator. The other tasks are also his/hers
responsibility, unless a second therapist is present.
Communication between both therapists is avoided,
in order not to create awkward moments for the
patients. Group therapy session occur in a room with
the presence of all the participants. Communication
is mainly oral, except for artifacts and artifact
fulfillment results (written on paper).
JoinTS considers this basic scenario and extends
into several dimensions, taking advantage of
technology. First, incorporating the results from
SCOPE (Carriço, 2003), it substitutes paper by
electronic artifacts, thus facilitating (re)definition,
exchange and filling of artifacts, gathering and
analysis of results and observation of artifact filling
activities. Secondly, it introduces the e-group
dimension, thus facilitating group management and
group distribution and recollection of artifacts and
results, but also the conjunct analysis and collective
synchronized monitoring of results.
306
Duarte L., Carriço L., de M. and Luís D. (2007).
JOINTS - Addressing Group Psychotherapy Requirements.
In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - HCI, pages 306-309
DOI: 10.5220/0002385603060309
Copyright
c
SciTePress
This poster addresses these two contributions,
and in particular the second one, around a single-
room setting with all participants present. Three
different arrangements were identified: a traditional
one, with computational support for patients and
therapists; a similar one, but with the addition of a
Large Public Display (LPD); and finally, one with
an Interactive Large Public Display (I-LPD).
2.1 System’s Architecture
Figure 1 shows JoinTS architecture that deals with a
single room scenario setting. A wireless access point
allows participants to communicate with each other.
Patients use small mobile devices to operate the
form-filling tools, while therapists usually recur to
more powerful devices (Tablet PCs or Laptops. The
communication and database modules are typically
supported by dedicated PCs, though they can operate
in a therapist’s device.
Figure 1: LPD Architecture.
2.1.1 Database Server
The Database Server is responsible for storing
records about therapists, patients and their historical
progress, all artifacts created, to whom they are
assigned and respective results. In the group therapy
scenario, session data is also stored, such as its
attendees, annotations taken and message’s
exchanged.
2.1.2 Communication Server
The Communication Server ensures the flow of
message’s exchanging during a session. Both
therapists and patients must login to the server in
order to be part of the session. All requests and
messages must pass through this component which,
in turn, will forward them to their destinations. The
Communication Server provides a message
subscription mechanism to allow moderators to
configure which types of messages are forwarded to
them.
2.1.3 Public Display Controller
The Public Display Controller is a small component
used in the presence of the LPD (or I-LPD). Its main
purpose is to receive, interpret and present the data
(previously staged in the Session Facilitation Tool)
intended to be shown on the LPD.
In case an I-LPD is used, the Public Display
Controller is also responsible for notifying the
therapists’ monitoring applications about the
changes made directly on the presented data.
2.1.4 Session Manager
This component provides a way to manage a therapy
session, allowing therapists to explicitly start and
finish each session and performing a shallow-
configuration of the communication flow in the
system. The manager provides a message
subscription interface to manage the destinations of
the exchanged messages, enabling the therapist to
explicitly state which type of operations he / she
wants to receive and be notified about.
2.1.5 Session Facilitation Tool
The Session Facilitation Tool is the main monitoring
and analysis component for in-session environments.
The component provides all necessary mechanisms
to have an overall view of what is happening during
a therapy session. It also introduces the virtual space
notion in this system, providing the therapists with
three different areas to work on: the private, shared
and public spaces. Besides these work spaces it also
provides a tool to register quick annotations, an
instant messaging interface to communicate with the
second therapist and the necessary tools to stage the
data which will be presented in the LPD.
2.1.6 Analysis Office
The Analysis Office’s primary goal is to provide a
powerful analysis environment for the therapists in
off-session settings. It is possible for a therapist to
check a patient’s progress during his therapy
sessions or his homework repertoire. However, this
tool can also be extended to group settings,
providing ways to visualize entire group’s
questionnaire-filling results or getting statistics
(tables or graphics) about the latter.
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2.1.7 Patient Tools
In order for the patients to perform their activities
both outside and during sessions, we provide them
with form-filling software for PDAs which can be
used to answer questionnaires delivered to them as
homework or in-session activities. This software is
based on the SCOPE project with a few extensions
to allow for file transferring via wireless
communication (Carriço, 2003).
3 SESSION FACILITATION
The facilitation of the session will be one of the
major activities performed by the therapists.
Therefore, special care must be taken into account
when developing the interfaces to support these
activities. The introduction of easy-to-use interfaces
as well as the notion of virtual spaces to the system
are some of the features presented by JoinTS to help
therapists facilitate group sessions.
3.1 Virtual Workspaces
An important challenge in groupware applications is
how to manage, visualize and share workspaces.
Three different workspaces were identified to stand
up to the therapists’ needs: a Private Space, a Shared
Space and a Public Space (Figure 2).
The Private Space is used to prepare data
visualization layouts and to monitor or analyze
information. A coupled toolbar allows the therapist
to choose which patients he wants to add to the
workspace and which questionnaire will be
distributed to them. The Shared Space serves both
therapists interests by allowing them to exchange or
mix the layouts they prepared in their Private
Spaces. The Public Space acts as a monitoring area
for the patients, corresponding to what is shown on
the LPD (if present).
Figure 2: Virtual Workspace tabs.
3.2 Therapists Group
Communication between therapists is crucial for the
session. Therefore, a communication sub channel for
therapists was created, thus supporting the above
mentioned activity without patient’s perception
(Huang, 2004).
A simple interface (Figure 3) is presented to
support this feature, coupled with the Session
Facilitation Tool. A single chat panel is used to
present both the therapists’ chat log and server’s
notification messages.
Figure 3: Session Facilitator Control Panel.
The shared space can be used by therapists to
exchange data among them, promoting discussion
and data analysis during the session.
The Listing Tool panel is used to prepare
visualization layouts. The therapist can quickly
select which form, group (and respective patients)
will be presented in the layout. The three buttons
below the Listing Tool can be used to transfer the
layouts between the different virtual spaces.
3.3 Therapists-Patients Group
A second communication channel is used to provide
a way to distribute / retrieve artifacts during the
session and to monitor all activities performed by
the patients. The before mentioned message
subscription system reveals its usefulness in this
setting: the main therapist can, for instance, receive
thought registries, while the second therapist can
receive full questionnaire-filling results for
evaluation during the session.
The main activity of the session’s facilitator
towards the therapy group is to monitor the patients’
work (Figure 4). To achieve this task the system
provides a desktop-like interface with the capability
of being populated with replicas of the Patients’
Tools. The therapist can add or remove replicas
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(each representing one participant) as well as freely
move them in the workspace.
Figure 4: Session Facilitation Tool Monitoring Interface.
The patient’s Status can be seen in the Patient
Tools toolbar on top of each replica (Figure 5). The
first two buttons indicate if the patient is present in
the session and if he’s being monitored in the LPD.
The last group of buttons indicates in which of the
virtual spaces the patient is being manipulated.
Therapists can quickly remove or add the patient to /
from any of the spaces through this interface.
Figure 5: Patients Tools toolbar.
4 FUTURE WORK
For the next phase of the project we will direct our
efforts into the development of a Session Facilitation
Tool for small mobile devices counterpart. This
version requires more care when creating the
appropriate interfaces due to the intrinsic constraints
of the target platform. Our second focus is to
understand how the presented architecture scales to
different scenarios, such as multiple room settings
and multiple sub-group support.
5 CONCLUSIONS
Traditional group psychotherapy settings, without
computational support, tend to be time consuming
and consequently, often disregard important aspects
in a group therapy session such as monitoring the
patients’ actions or reviewing their weekly
homework and registries. In addition, therapists
should feel comfortable working with groupware
software, even if they don’t have the necessary
academic qualifications to do so.
In this paper we present JoinTS, a project whose
main goal is to deliver computational support for
psychotherapy activities, both individual (Carriço,
2005) and group variants, while not disrupting the
traditional therapy workflows. Using emerging
mobile technologies and different design
approaches, we grant the users the mobility to try
different therapy scenarios and by adding a Large
Public Display we provide a way to present relevant
information to the audience and promote sharing and
discussion of experiences among the group.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was partially funded by FCT through
project JoinTS and LaSIGE.
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