Towards the Healing Car: Investigating the Potential of Psychotherapeutic In-vehicle Interventions

The globally increasing prevalence and incident rates of mental diseases is one of the most serious public health challenges according to the World Health Organization. Today, treatment is based on professional therapies which require a high amount of financial resources and personnel effort, however IT-supported interventions in ubiquitous devices promise help and a new leverage beyond traditional therapies. We identify the car as a space for new treatments since drivers often have time and the environment in the automobile is highly controlled. In-vehicle information systems can reach people in their daily routine and could introduce innovative prevention measures. In this research in progress paper, we address the open question how the car can improve a driver’s affective state while driving. First, we thoroughly describe the design of a study we conducted to motivate other researchers for this topic. Second, we analyse 631 completed interventions collected in a 2-month field study with 10 drivers. First analyses indicate that we can positively influence the short-term affective state of drivers with at least one of ourintervention types. We provide first practical examples of how to reach the masses of everyday drivers.