Ronghua Xu*, Honglu Zou, Sidie Tan, Qingpeng Zhang and Lifan Zhu
Background: Studies have shown that the phenomenon of fetal malformations can cause serious psychological problems and even depressive symptoms of pregnant women during their perinatal period. Psychological studies have shown that involving these women into appropriate interventions and treatments can effectively alleviate their depressed symptoms. With the prevalence of mobile technologies and online social networks, practitioners and researchers have been dedicating to move the offline intervention strategies to online platforms for the treatment of depression caused by fetal malformations.
System design: We design an online Depression Intervention system (DEPINV), suitable for the online intervention of depressed woman suffering from fetal malformations. There are three main features in the design of DEPINV. First, it intends for the effective coordination and interaction among three types of user roles in order to reach a tripartite synergistic therapy effect. Second, it focuses on the assessment and monitoring of users’ psychological state, and the Accept Cognition Theory (ACT) is introduced into the design of the system for the intervention. Third, various communication channels are provided to assist users’ coordination and ACT based intervention.
System implementation: To make the access easy and flexible, we adopt the WeChat applet as the development and deploying technical framework. Therefore, DEPINV is a WeChat applet that can be accessed by simply scanning the Quick Response (QR) code. It cooperates three types of users, the healthcare providers, depressed women and their family members. That is, DEPINV helps healthcare providers to maintain and manage the psychological states of depressed women with the involvement of their family members. There are six successive stages in the core function of the ACT based intervention and each target for the accomplishment of one specific psychological state. Through the comprehensive management of treatment procedure, DEPINV applet helps healthcare providers record and monitor the dynamic change of patients' affections. To cope with the negative emotions of depressed women, various channels of information support, social support and emotional support are also provided for instant communication between healthcare providers and family members.
Conclusion: The DEPINV applet provides effective online interventional strategies and treatments for depressed women with the help of both healthcare providers and their family members. When more interventional features and functions are included, it is necessary to extend the applet into a mental health app.
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