Secure Mobile Automation of Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMA) For Structured Querying

The ubiquitous nature of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets make them ideal platforms for engaging users in Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMA). In EMA, participants are repeatedly assessed frequently (daily or multiple times per day) through a set of questionnaires. Fluctuations in psychological states, such as cognition and effect can be recorded in real time using mobile devices. EMA results can further be coupled with other physiological sensor data procured through wearables and smartphones, to validate and correlate patient experiences and responses to certain treatments and medications. This can be useful for health care organizations which are interested in the impact of their treatment techniques on patient populations. In this paper, we present an EMA platform developed using Android mobile devices. The collected results are shown and techniques used to query the data are demonstrated. The platform is flexible and can scale up to perform data mining algorithms for sentiment analysis based on the stimulus to a medication or treatment over a prolonged period of time. Received on 17 January 2018; accepted on 21 March 2018; published on 23 March 2018