2024, Van Velsen, Lex, Schokking, Lotte, Siderakis, Eva, Knospe, Gloria-Mona, Brandl, Lena, Mooser, Bettina, Madörin, Sarah, Bilreiro Jacinto Braga, Ana Sofia, Gouveia, Afonso, Brodbeck, Jeannette

To support older mourners after the loss of their partner, LEAVES, an online self-help service that delivers the LIVIA spousal bereavement intervention, was developed. It integrates an embodied conversational agent and an initial risk assessment. Based on an iterative, human-centered, and stakeholder inclusive approach, interviews with older mourners and focus groups with stakeholders were conducted to understand their perspective on grief and on using LEAVES. Subsequently, the resulting technology and service model were evaluated by means of interviews, focus groups, and an online survey. While digital literacy remains a challenge, LEAVES shows promise of being supportive to the targeted end-users.

2022-04, Brandl, Lena, Cabrita, Miriam, Brodbeck, Jeannette, Heylen, Dirk, Van Velsen, Lex

While much effort has been devoted to the development of mental e-health interventions, the tailoring of these applications to user characteristics and needs is a comparatively novel field of research. The premise of personalizing mental e-health interventions is that personalization increases user motivation and (thereby) mitigates intervention dropout and enhances clinical effectiveness. In this study, we selected user profile parameters for personalizing a mental e-health intervention for older adults who lost their spouse. We conducted a three-round Delphi study involving an international and interdisciplinary expert panel (N = 16) with two objectives. The first aim was to elicit adaptation strategies that can be used to dynamically readjust the intervention to the user's needs. The second aim was to identify a set of meaningful indicators for monitoring the user from within the grief intervention to escalate from self-help to blended care, whenever advisable. This Delphi study used as starting point an evaluated, text-based grief intervention composed of ten modules, including psychoeducation about grief and cognitive-behavioral exercises to support the user in adjusting their lives after bereavement. Every user follows this grief intervention in a linear fashion from beginning to end. The resulting conceptual adaptation model encompasses dynamic adjustments, as well as one-time adjustments performed at the initialization of the service. On the level of the application structure, the adaptations affect when which topic module is presented to the user. The adaptations further provide strategies for adjusting the text-based content of individual intervention modules dependent on user characteristics and for selecting appropriate reactions to user input. Eighteen monitoring parameters were elicited and grouped into four categories: clinical, behavioral/emotional, interactive, and external. Parameters that were perceived as most urgent to attend to for escalation were Suicidality, Self-destructive behavior, Client-initiated escalation, Unresponsiveness and (Complicated) Grief symptoms.