Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Aug 24, 2019
Date Accepted: May 14, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Can You Peer-ceive Me? Peers as Trusted Sources for Human State Assessment: A PeerMA Method Feasibility Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
The widespread use of smartphones helps individuals to self-report their subjective physical and emotional states, as well as to report states they perceive from significant acquaintances around them.
Objective:
The objective of this study was to evaluate feasibility and human factors influencing the acceptance and reliability of ‘Peer-ceived Momentary Assessment (PeerMA)’ research method where smartphones are leveraged to enable an estimate of the individual’s state e.g., stress duration based on his/her designated peers (friends, family members).
Methods:
We have recruited 13 participants to self-report their perceived levels of stress, fatigue, and anxiety multiple times a day using Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) along 4 weeks. The participants invited a total of 20 peers (e.g., friends, relatives) to assess the same outcomes as they perceived them projected by the participant using the PeerMA method.
Results:
Preliminary results show that, using PeerMA, 55% of peers reported daily anxiety assessments whose median was statistically equal to that reported by their participant. The number was 40% for stress, and 30% for fatigue assessments. Additionally, peers correctly assessed directional changes of the participant’s reported outcomes (i.e. from higher to lower) 46% of the time (within the same day), and 73% within the same and the next day. Mean directional accuracy was similar for fatigue and stress, and slightly lower for anxiety. Finally, results suggest that peers were better at identifying when the subject reported "medium level" of the outcome (69%), followed by "low level" (19%), and "high level" (16%). We have also identified a set of human factors influencing the data quality collected and discuss their implications for the further re-design of the PeerMA method.
Conclusions:
It is possible to leverage the PeerMA method as a complement to EMA to assess constructs that fall in the realm of observable behaviours and states in healthy individuals. Clinical Trial: Study Protocol “Exploring the value of social links and human-machine collaboration in the context of stress assessment.” Protocol N. CUREG.201807 approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Geneva (CH). Protocol Director: Prof. K. Wac, Active from July 10th, 2018 to December 31st, 2022
Citation
