Abstract for NIH Grant U01 HL09173 Supplemental Project Extensible Platform for Implementing Experience Sampling Studies on Mobile Phones The following describes the goals of a complimentary, supplemental project to the new 4-year project. Team members working on both the main project and the supplement will collaborate. Project Abstract: The primary aim of this NIH-funded project is the technical development and pilot testing of a flexible and extensible software platform that permits researchers to conduct ecological momentary assessment (EMA) studies using mobile phones. Electronic EMA is a promising methodology for acquiring data on behaviors of free-living persons at high temporal resolution. This work extend prior MIT software for context-sensitive EMA, where wearable sensor technology such as accelerometers and GPS, are used to trigger questions at appropriate times and places. Researchers currently interested in using even traditional electronic EMA, however, face several barriers. Commercial software is expensive. Free software often requires hiring a professional programmer for customization, or it only works on obsolete devices. Most software is designed for PDAs, which are bulky to carry and expensive, even for small number-of-subject studies. Distribution and maintenance of the PDA devices is costly and cumbersome, consuming research time. Finally, the software does not make the new sensing capabilities of mobile devices, particularly phones, available to the researcher.
We will demonstrate how four existing stress and substance exposure assessment instruments can be converted to instruments that run on mobile phones using the open-source software that we develop. The software will be collaboratively designed and evaluated with both experts on stress and substance exposure as well as a panel of typical phone users. An expert panel will be formed with six psychosocial stress measurement and addictive substance exposure measurement researchers. The expert panel will be chosen with guidance from NIH Program Scientists; some of the experts are likely to be investigators on other U01 GEI grants. The development team at MIT will then use a participatory design process to iteratively refine technology prototypes based upon the feedback of the expert panel and a second panel of ten phone users recruited from the general public. Once the prototype software is functional on phones, members of both panels will be given phones and will use the assessment technology continuously for the remainder of the supplemental period. The software will run the four stress and substance exposure instruments converted to the phone platform with guidance from members of the expert panel. A secondary aim of the proposed work is to begin assessment of interest in and viability of a novel and national “opt-in” public service program where typical Americans would use their mobile phones to help medical researchers gather and interpret health behavior data. In recent years, Americans have been able to contribute personal computer time to support scientific research efforts. Participants in the proposed public service program would be able to contribute to public health by donating their “idle time,” i.e., taking a few minutes each week to complete “instant” surveys on their mobile phones. We will use the prototype technology as an example and meet with research and business leaders to assess the viability and interest in leveraging existing mobile phone technologies to enable measurement studies with a high degree of temporal resolution at the scale of hundreds of thousands or even millions of participants. This work will result in technology for the Exposure Biology Program, part of the U.S. Genes and Environment Initiative (http://www.gei.nih.gov/exposurebiology/). Principal Investigator: Stephen Intille, Ph.D. Last modified: 8/22/07 |
