Secure Mobile Automation of Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMA) For Structured Querying

Abstract

The ubiquitous nature of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets make them ideal platforms for engaging users in Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMA). In EMA, participants are repeatedly assessed frequently (daily or multiple times per day) through a set of questionnaires. Fluctuations in psychological states, such as cognition and e ect can be recorded in real time using mobile devices. EMA results can further be coupled with other physiological sensor data procured through wearables and smartphones, to validate and correlate patient experiences and responses to certain treatments and medications. This can be useful for health care organizations which are interested in the impact of their treatment techniques on patient populations. In this paper, we present an EMA platform developed using Android mobile devices. The collected results are shown and techniques used to query the data are demonstrated. The platform is flexible and can scale up to perform data mining algorithms for sentiment analysis based on the stimulus to a medication or treatment over a prolonged period of time.

Keywords

• Mobile health
• data collection
• health surveys