How We Work

The mEMA System The alternative to creating your own app is to use an end-to-end EMA and EMI platform that handles all your data streams in a cohesive manner bringing everything into one database with a consistent naming and timestamping protocol. Ideally, a system that can be accessed by anyone with a Smartphone and quickly customized to capture exactly the …

Why Use mEMA?

The Value in Your Research is NOT in the Technology The value in your research is not in the technology – it’s in the research design and what you do with the data. You’ve spent years, perhaps decades, becoming an expert in your field. That field of research is relying on you to keep probing the important questions and making …

Who is the mEMA System for?

If you are an academic researcher in the field of psychology, behavioral medicine, social science or public health looking to run an ecological momentary assessment or intervention study then you need to find a way to collect those data within the timeframe and budget dictated by your grant. In that past that might have meant hiring a developer or hobbling …

How to Run a Successful EMA/EMI Study

If you are a researcher involved in digital health or using ecological momentary assessment or intervention methodologies, then I want to show you how to successfully run your grant-funded study on time and on budget without hiring a developer. We’ve helped hundreds of researchers over the past ten years to do just that. Some Examples of our Work Suicide Ideation Phenotyping This study was …

Just-in-Time Adaptive Interventions Encourage Healthy Behavior

Just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs) [1] are strategies that are designed to provide support at the most opportune time and are attuned to the needs of an individual. These approaches are adaptive in nature so that they can deal with dynamic real-world internal and external environments.  JITAIs are often used to promote healthy changes in behavior [2], such as reducing smoking and …

New Technology Boosts the Use of Heart Rate Variability Biomarker in Medicine

HRV Predicts Psychological and Biological Functioning Heart rate variability (HRV) [1] – or the variation in number of heartbeats over a specific period of time – has been increasingly recognized as a predictor of psychological and biological dysfunction. Research has shown that lower HRV is associated with a host of health challenges. For instance, people with diseases ranging from diabetes [2] to …

The Use of HRV in Ecological Momentary Assessment Research

Next generation EMA Ecological Momentary Assessment is the method of capturing data from people as they go about their daily lives. Traditionally data collection has been mostly restricted to participant self-report, even with the shift towards the use of Smartphones. Since 2013 Ilumivu has been pioneering the capture of other data streams in EMA research including those captured passively from the phone (e.g. …

Researcher’s Guide to Wearables: Activity

Ambulatory Activity Tracking and EMA Physical activity can be tracked both by accelerometers already in the Smartphone or with a wearable activity / fitness tracker. One study suggests that phone apps measuring “steps” are more accurate than wearables. The mEMA System allows you to collect both wearable data and raw 3-axis accelerometer data from the phone. For many studies the data captured …

Researcher’s Guide to Wearables

Apps for Ecological Momentary Assessment are rapidly changing the manner in which psychology and behavioral health research is conducted. Close behind this wave of development is the use of wearable technologies in the same fields. This is a guide for researchers wishing to augment self-report EMA data with objective data collected from wearable devices and engage in some form of ambulatory assessment. Researchers are currently using wearable …

Putting the ECOLOGICAL into EMA

Ecological Momentary Assessment has been in used since the 1940s but only recently has the technology allowed for a deep understanding of the survey respondent’s local environment. Previously the “ecological” advantage of EMA was that researchers knew that the respondent was not in the lab but in one of their everyday locations (e.g. work, home, commuting etc.) and thus were sampling experience …