D'Alfonso Simon, Lederman Reeva, Bucci Sandra, Berry Katherine
School of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia.
Division of Psychology and Mental Health, School of Health Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom.
JMIR Ment Health. 2020 Dec 29;7(12):e21895. doi: 10.2196/21895.
The therapeutic alliance (TA), the relationship that develops between a therapist and a client/patient, is a critical factor in the outcome of psychological therapy. As mental health care is increasingly adopting digital technologies and offering therapeutic interventions that may not involve human therapists, the notion of a TA in digital mental health care requires exploration. To date, there has been some incipient work on developing measures to assess the conceptualization of a digital TA for mental health apps. However, the few measures that have been proposed have more or less been derivatives of measures from psychology used to assess the TA in traditional face-to-face therapy. This conceptual paper explores one such instrument that has been proposed in the literature, the Mobile Agnew Relationship Measure, and examines it through a human-computer interaction (HCI) lens. Through this process, we show how theories from HCI can play a role in shaping or generating a more suitable, purpose-built measure of the digital therapeutic alliance (DTA), and we contribute suggestions on how HCI methods and knowledge can be used to foster the DTA in mental health apps.
治疗联盟（TA），即治疗师与来访者/患者之间发展起来的关系，是心理治疗结果的一个关键因素。随着心理健康护理越来越多地采用数字技术并提供可能不涉及人类治疗师的治疗干预措施，数字心理健康护理中TA的概念需要进行探索。迄今为止，已经有一些初步工作致力于开发评估心理健康应用程序数字TA概念化的措施。然而，已提出的少数措施或多或少都是用于评估传统面对面治疗中TA的心理学措施的衍生版本。这篇概念性论文探讨了文献中提出的一种此类工具——移动阿格纽关系量表，并通过人机交互（HCI）的视角对其进行审视。通过这个过程，我们展示了HCI理论如何在塑造或生成更合适的、专门构建的数字治疗联盟（DTA）测量方法中发挥作用，并且我们就如何使用HCI方法和知识来促进心理健康应用程序中的DTA提出了建议。
