Many psychologists have not used Ecological Momentary Assessment but are interested in doing so, this guide is for you. WHAT IS EMA? Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) grew out of the earlier Experience Sampling Method (ESM) pioneered by Csikszentmihalyi in his study of Flow. EMS traditionally focused on assessing internal thoughts and feelings while EMA broadens the reach to health, events or …
Researcher’s Guide to Wearables: Heart Rate and HRV
At ilumivu we receive a lot of requests about ambulatory assessment of heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) and how to best integrate these metrics with mobile Ecological Momentary Assessment (mEMA). Some of our clients are interested in capturing heart rate (HR) for the study of physical movement and fitness, others are interested in capturing heart rate variability (HRV) either as a marker or cardiovascular …
Mobile and Internet Technologies for Program Evaluation
In a 2016 paper in the journal Evaluation and Program Planning, Frank Materia et al. provide a high-level overview of some of the advantages and considerations for performing program evaluation with mobile and internet technologies. Below is a bullet point summary of the issue they raise for those who don’t have access to, or the time to read, the full paper. Materia et …
Apps for Substance Abuse Research
Substance abuse research and treatment is a growing area of application for ecological momentary assessment (EMA) apps such as mEMA by ilumivu. The nature of the behavior makes substance abuse a prime candidate for being studied in the context of daily life rather than in the lab or through retrospective self-report. EMA (or Experience Sampling Method) offers an avenue for capturing time-varying subjective experiences close to …
Global Reach
mEMA has been designed to handle large international studies. The ilumivu team are currently supporting an Experience Sampling study across four countries each which their own language and time zone – Australia, China, Italy, and Germany. We have previously supported projects in Polish, Spanish and Korean. The challenge is two fold. Firstly, we had to make sure that the Survey Editor would allow the …
Big Data
Organizations embarking on Big Data initiatives often need to make system wide changes to support collection, storage and meaningful analysis. The ilumivu system is in use by The Data Warehousing Institute to provide an online assessment tools for companies wishing to assess their readiness for handling big data. The online survey collects their answers and automatically generates reports to show each …
Wearables for Autism
Alongside the rapidly growing consumer market for wearable sensors is an expanding research trend of combining EMA / Experience Sampling with passive data collection from wearables. Over the last few years we have supported numerous projects using third party sensors alongside our mEMA apps. The project closest to our hearts is one supporting children and adolescents with severe autism. The mEMA …