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. 2023 Apr 26:10:e38920.
doi: 10.2196/38920.

Reintroducing the Effortless Assessment Research System (EARS)

Monika N Lind  1 , Lauren E Kahn  1 , Ryann Crowley  1 , Wyatt Reed  1 , Geordie Wicks  1 , Nicholas B Allen  1
Affiliations

Reintroducing the Effortless Assessment Research System (EARS)

Monika N Lind et al. JMIR Ment Health. .

Abstract

This paper reintroduces the Effortless Assessment Research System (EARS), 4 years and 10,000 participants after its initial launch. EARS is a mobile sensing tool that affords researchers the opportunity to collect naturalistic, behavioral data via participants' naturalistic smartphone use. The first section of the paper highlights improvements made to EARS via a tour of EARS's capabilities-the most important of which is the expansion of EARS to the iOS operating system. Other improvements include better keyboard integration for the collection of typed text; full control of survey design and administration for research teams; and the addition of a researcher-facing EARS dashboard, which facilitates survey design, the enrollment of participants, and the tracking of participants. The second section of the paper goes behind the scenes to describe 3 challenges faced by the EARS developers-remote participant enrollment and tracking, keeping EARS running in the background, and continuous attention and effort toward data protection-and how those challenges shaped the design of the app.

Keywords: digital mental health; digital phenotyping; ecological momentary assessment; mobile sensing; passive sensing; personal sensing.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of Interest: The authors (MNL, LEK, RC, WR, GW, and NBA) all hold equity interests in Ksana Health Inc, the company that has the sole commercial license for certain versions of the Effortless Assessment Research System (EARS) mobile phone app and some related EARS tools. The authors LEK, RC, WR, and NBA also receive salary from Ksana Health Inc.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
The Effortless Assessment Research System (EARS) app icon.
Figure 2
Figure 2
The overview conveys the number of participants uploading without issues, uploading with issues, not uploading at all, and deactivated. “Deactivated” denotes Effortless Assessment Research System (EARS) installations that have been deactivated by the researcher, usually when the participant finishes the study.
Figure 3
Figure 3
The device list elaborates on the participants categorized in the overview as uploading with issues and not uploading at all. The device list displays their participant ID, last upload date, research site, and operating system.
Figure 4
Figure 4
The device dot plot allows researchers to determine at a glance which sensors are uploading on which days for individual participants. EMA: ecological momentary assessment.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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