Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Apr 21, 2022
Date Accepted: Dec 13, 2022
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Re-introducing the Effortless Assessment Research System (EARS)
ABSTRACT
This paper re-introduces the Effortless Assessment Research System (EARS), four years and 4,000 participants after its initial launch. EARS is a mobile sensing tool that affords researchers the opportunity to collect naturalistic, behavioral data via participants’ normal smartphone use. The first section of the paper highlights improvements made to EARS via a tour of EARS’s capabilities across iOS and Android. The most important improvement is the expansion of EARS to iOS. 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, enrollment of participants, and tracking of participants. The second section of the paper goes behind the scenes to describe three challenges faced by the EARS developers –remote participant enrollment and tracking, keeping EARS running on participant phones, and continuous attention and effort toward data protection– and how those challenges shaped the design of the app.
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Copyright
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