Designing an assisted self-help mobile app to cope with panic disorder: Preliminary results and open issues

During the latest years, mental health disturbances related to anxiety have become more and more widespread. Among them, panic disorder is fairly common and affects a significant percentage of people in the U.S. and in Europe, regardless of their instruction level, social state and culture, with obvious consequences to the health and social care systems. Many approaches exist to the treatment of panic disorder, and all of them share the requirement of making the patient feel actively involved as the main responsible of the success or failure of the therapy. This has led to increasing interest among specialists in developing strategies based on pure or assisted self-help. Mindfulness-based psychotherapy, which has been proved to be particularly effective with anxiety disorders, is often delivered in self-help formats. Many mobile applications exist which guide users through step-by-step training programmes and provide general information about this kind of practice, but the supervision of a psychotherapist, although advisable, is seldom provided. In this paper, we introduce the prototype of a mobile application based on the key concept of self-efficacy, whose goal is to help users prevent and cope with panic and anxiety disturbs under the guidance of mental health professionals. We will describe the theoretical background we relied upon and the different phases involved in the design of the application. Preliminary results, future work, and open issues will also be discussed.