eSano – An eHealth Platform for Internet- and Mobile-based Interventions

The prevention and treatment of mental disorders and chronic somatic diseases is a core challenge for health care systems of the 21th century. Mental- and behavioral health interventions provide the means for lowering the public health burden. However, structural deficits, reluctance to use existing services, perceived stigma and further personal and environmental reasons restrict the uptake of these evidence-based approaches. Internet- and mobile-based interventions (IMIs) might overcome some of the limitations of on-site interventions by providing an anonymous, scalable, time- and location-independent, yet evidence-based approach. In order to implement digital mental and behavioral health concepts across the life-span into practice, a technical solution to support the design, creation, and execution of IMIs is needed. However, there are various conceptual, technical as well as legal challenges to implementing a corresponding software solution in the healthcare domain. Therefore, the work at hand (1) identifies these challenges and derives a number of respective requirements, (2) introduces the eHealth platform eSano, a software project developed by an interdisciplinary team of computer scientists, psychologists, therapists, and other domain experts, with the aim to serve as a flexible basis for mental and behavioral research and health care, and (3) provides technical insights into the developed platform and its approach to address the aforementioned requirements.