Undiagnosed atrial fibrillation can significantly increase the risk of stroke or heart failure. Recent studies have shown that wearable devices such as smartwatches could be helpful in tracking symptoms, leading to an earlier diagnosis and prevention of complications. These devices provide a more cost-effective option for individuals to track their symptoms.

ASHEVILLE, N.C., Oct. 21, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — ilumivu, Inc., a pioneer in predictive and personalized healthcare intervention software utilized at university hospitals and healthcare research organizations worldwide, announced that it has completed its acquisition of Cardiogram, Inc., whose mobile app is a leader in continuous cardiovascular monitoring using wearable devices. In support of the acquisition and the improved opportunity to commercialize the company’s

A promising approach to symptom monitoring is suicidal speech prediction, as speech can be passively collected and may indicate changes in risk. Since suicidal ideation is associated with emotion dysregulation, John Gideon’s research focuses on the detection of emotion from speech and its relation to suicide.

Chani Nuij, MSc’s study presents the rationale and protocol of the Continuous Assessment for Suicide Prevention and Research (CASPAR) study. The research team’s goals of the study are two-fold: to evaluate the feasibility of mobile safety planning and daily mobile self monitoring in routine care treatment for suicidal patients, and to conduct fundamental research on suicidal processes. Clinical guidelines recommend

Synopsis Negative symptoms of Schizophrenia – including blunted affect and alogia – are poorly understood yet amongst the most debilitating to patients. They are traditionally assessed with questionnaire measures or clinician ratings both of which are subject to bias and limited to whenever the patient comes into a clinic. There is a need for measures that are objective and more

Dr. Evan Kleinman, Ph.D | Harvard Medical School |

A group from Harvard Medical School used the mEMA System for “digital phenotyping” – real-time characterization and quantification in human thought in situ. They found five previously unknown distinct phenotypes of suicidal thought. there was a significant relationship between some of these phenotypes and a recent suicide attempt. This work has opened up a new avenue in the understanding of suicide and its prevention.

Lydia Shrier, MD, MPH | Boston Children’s Hospital | The team used motivational counseling with adolescents using marijuana. They found it effective but wondered if they could make it more effective by adding an ecological momentary intervention component. They used the mEMA System to provide personalized messages to participants throughout the day that were tailored to the specific momentary context (e.g. hanging out with friends).

Join host Adrian Sinclair and Kat Houghton as they discuss her work, how our connection with nature plays a role in mental wellness, what are the challenges surrounding mental health, how we can change the stigma and break the gender bias on mental health, and how their company is doing in providing digital information and services in the aspect of mental health.

Cancer is a leading cause of death in Australia – almost 50,000 deaths from cancer were estimated for 2019…… and it is scary.How scary? Ryno and Kat Houghton discuss their own personal stories relating to the effects of this awful disease.

Join world-class doctors, Dr. Ron Gharbo and Dr. David Cifu for episode 4 of season 1 as they welcome PHD in Psychology, Co-Founder & Research Director at Ilumivu, Kat Houghton. David Cifu, MD is an internationally academic leader and innovator who specializes in initiating, developing, fostering and leading small and large-scale collaborations across the research, clinical, education and philanthropic arenas

It’s not everyday you meet someone who holds a PhD and is a startup founder, but it’s not everyday you meet someone like Kat Houghton. After working with children and parents of children with autism for close to a decade while earning her PhD, Kat saw an opportunity to apply technology to psychology and founded ilumivu. ilumivu offers mobile, web

Awarepreneurs is a popular conscious business and social entrepreneurs podcast.

October 27, 2020 – Asheville, NC. – ilumivu announced today that PsyTech, Inc. – an industry leader in advancing psychedelic medicine – has signed an exclusive agreement to create its Psychedelic Assisted Therapy (PAT) clinical application for worldwide deployment powered by ilumivu’s software platform. Venture-backed PsyTech is the leading therapeutic psychedelics community builder and venture developer in education, training, and

What is an ecological momentary assessment? How are ecological momentary interventions powerful and helpful in a clinical research setting? Learn more about how digital technology, smart phone applications, electronic surveys, and wearable devices can help in both the clinical research and the clinical treatment arena. In this fascinating interview with Dr. Katherine Houghton, she answers your most pressing questions about applying digital technology to capture real-world/real-time data, and to help patients at the most critical times.

In this episode, we are speaking with psychologist and tech founder, Kat Houghton. Kat founded ilumivu to help mental health clinicians and researchers support real-time behavioral interventions. She is a pioneer in using digital tech to disrupt the way mental health is accessed and delivered. Listen in as Andrew, Fahad, and Kat discuss health and tech, data collection, and the good we

What is an ecological momentary assessment? How are ecological momentary interventions powerful and helpful in a clinical research setting? Learn more about how digital technology, smart phone applications, electronic surveys, and wearable devices can help in both the clinical research and the clinical treatment arena. In this fascinating interview with Dr. Katherine Houghton, she answers your most pressing questions about

One of the key features of the system’s intelligence is that it can sense your physiological state and detect increases in stress or changes in mood before you may become consciously aware of them. This means it can help you re-direct earlier so you can use the tools and strategies your therapist has helped you learn when they are most effective, before you head into emotional dysregulation. In this video, our co-founder, Kat Houghton, shows you how to set up the mEMA System to use physiological data in your study.

The Adrian Sinclair Show focuses on real conversations with interesting people, exploration of interesting projects, topics, and ideas worth talking about. New episodes stream every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday 7AM MT.

In this conversation with Bruce Langford of the Mindfulness Mode podcast ilumivu co-founder Kat Houghton talks about wearable technology can increase our awareness of our behavior, bringing it more under conscious control. She describes some of the just-in-time adaptive intervention ilumivu has been involved in.  Recorded June 24th 2020

Ecological Sampling of Affect, Social Context and Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviors For adolescents hospitalized for suicidal thoughts and behaviors, the transition from inpatient to the home environment is a high risk time for repeated attempts, re-hospitalization, and even death by suicide. However, most research aimed at understanding the factors that contribute to this risk is implemented retrospectively, resulting in a

The Relationship of Mental Co-morbidities with Glycemic Control in People with Diabetes Mellitus Negative interrelationships between diabetes and depression/affective comorbidity with potentially impaired self-management and glucose control, as well as increased risks of long-term complications in affected people, have been in the focus of psychological diabetes research for several decades. Although elevated risks of vascular complications were established in those

This short video explains how we identify participants and their data in the mEMA System without using any Personally Identifying Information (PII).

The end product of your EMA data collection is the data sheet – it’s got to be useful!  The mEMA System makes it easy for you to set up the data file as you need it through the Survey Editor. In this video our Co-Founder, Kat Houghton PhD, show you the data file and how it relates to what you

A comprehensive review of how technology is evolving the way we can modify behaviors and improve behaviorally-relevant treatments was recently published by Nicole Nugent and colleagues in the journal Behavior Modification.  Here, we summarize key points from this article, which articulates both the importance of ongoing, repeated behavioral assessments as a way to understand the impact of a given intervention, as

Dr. Mary Mackesy-Amiti’s investigates the commonality between borderline personality disorder (BPD) with people who inject drugs (PWID), and its association with receptive syringe sharing. Dr. Mackesy-Amiti’s study utilized ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to examine associations between emotion dysregulation, a characteristic of BPD, as well as patterns of negative affect and receptive syringe sharing among PWID. Participants used the mEMA phone

Gregory Strauss, Ph.D | University of Georgia | Reliable and valid scales for assessment of the negative symptoms of Schizophrenia are available. However, they have certain issues that affect their validity, such as recall biases, halo effects, and issues of social desirability as they are usually completed with the clinician. Dr. Strauss’s group wanted to know if digital phenotyping methods could be complementary to the existing scales.

Dr. Mary E. Mackesy-Amiti’s study utilized ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to measure negative affect in people who inject drugs (PWID), and her study examined associations with borderline personality disorder (BPD) symptoms and hardships with emotion regulation, in the context of injection drug use.  Participants used mEMA phone application to report on mood, substance use, and injection behavior for two weeks.

Daniel D.L. Coppersmith’s study advocates for the role of of social support in predicting at risk suicide behavior and pliancy; examining the daily fluctuations of recognized social support. Over the course of 28 days, Daniel’s study used mEMA to examine the daily fluctuations of 53 adults who had attempted suicide within the past year, and capriciousness of social support was

Psychologists and scientists have long recognized that human cognition is what separates us from other forms of life (Au, Piers, & Devine, S, 2017). Understanding how to evaluate our cognitive abilities across a broad array of contexts, including assessing the integrity of our cognition in the face of injury or disease are thus top priorities for researchers and clinicians alike.

Dr. Shannon B. Juengst’s study using Ecological Momentary Assessment was designed to determine the feasibility of delivering an evidence based self management intervention, problem-solving training (PST), to care partners of individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI), spinal cord injury (SPI), burn injury, or stroke during the inpatient hospital stay. PST is a metacognitive self-management intervention that teaches individuals a global strategy

Dr. Kathleen Martin Ginis’ study utilizes ecological momentary assessment to measure the intra-individual diurnal variations in neuropathic pain and affect on exercise and non-exercise days in a community setting. The study aims to provide a deeper understanding of how neuropathic pain and affect change from pre to post-exercise, and over time. Using the mEMA System, participants with spinal cord injuries

Dr. Mary E. Mackesy-Amiti’s study tests the acceptability and feasibility of ecological momentary assessment (EMA) of mood and injection risk behavior among young people who inject drugs (PWID), using mobile phones.  Participants used the mEMA System to respond to momentary surveys on mood, substance use, and injection risk behavior for 15 days. Participants were assigned to receive surveys four, five,

Catiana Leila Possamai Romanzini’s study describes sedentary behavior (SB) in the physical, social, and environmental contexts and verify the agreement between mobile Ecological Momentary Assessment (mEMA) and accelerometry in the in the identification of SB in young adults.  Over the course of seven days 123 young adults used concomitant mEMA and Actigraph wGT3xBT accelerometer. Data of 2,262 mEMA prompts and

In his study, Dr. Matthew Kwan examines the acute transition of physical activity (PA) of out of high school aged adolescents into early adulthood. The MovingU study works to gain a comprehensive understanding of the behavioural patterns and the socio-ecological factors related to the changes in PA during transition out of high school. The MovingU study was comprised of two phases

Dr. Evan Kleinman’s study examines whether the occurrence of suicidal thinking was followed by decreased negative affect and increased positive affect in 43 adult participants who attempted suicide at least once in the past year. The mEMA System was used to run 28 days of smartphone-based real-time monitoring, where participants were signaled four times per day to report on current affect

What is Digital Phenotyping? Digital phenotyping provides an objective way to gather data through digital devices such as Smartphones, which can improve research and clinical practice by avoiding the pitfalls of limited data or self-reporting as the basis of diagnosis (Insel, 2018). This new approach to data collection, which was first defined less than five years ago, employs sensors that track activity

Heart Rate The mEMA System is deeply integrated with Garmin wearable devices. We use the Garmin Companion SDK to pull real-time data directly from the wearable into the mEMA app. From there it can be sent up to the ilumivu server in combination with the mobile EMA data and used to trigger events on the phone.  This article provides a

Kat Houghton briefly explains how to use the mEMA platform to set up key elements of your mobile Ecological Momentary Assessment or Intervention study.

Kat Houghton explains how to set goals for your participants based on their Garmin data then feedback their individual progress to them through the mEMA app. You can set this all up yourself through the mEMA platform – no programming required.

A quick description of how the mEMA platform combines three distinct data streams (self-report, passive phone sensors and physiological data) to feed into your decision tree to deliver the right message to the right person at the right moment.

mEMA is a mobile app for Ecological Momentary Assessment and Experience Sampling research. It captures self-report, location, motion, phone use and physiological data from integrated wearable sensors. It is the only mobile EMA system that supports physiologically triggered mobile surveys.

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Even though mEMA is a self-service platform, you are not alone! Our staff is here to support you and ensure your study is a success. This quick video leads you through how we can support you in creating your own EMA or EMI study.

If you have an upcoming EMA or EMI study, then I’d love to talk to you about the requirements of your study and see if the mEMA System will be a good fit for you. Our pricing is term-based; you purchase a subscription to the system for 6 months, 1 year or more. Subscriptions start at $2,650 for the 6-month Basic

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

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

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

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 (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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today on Autism Resources International’s Awareness Series hosts Aaron Deland and Monika Zands will share all about one of our featured sponsors Kat Houghton from Relate to Autism. She has donated ten 6 month memberships to www.relatetoautism.com for our silent auction. Tune in to see how this can really impact a families ability to reach their child.Autism Resources International Awareness Series Autism