Geographically-explicit Ecological Momentary Assessment (GEMA) Architecture and Components: Lessons Learned from PMOMS

ABSTRACT

Geographically explicit Ecological Momentary Assessment (GEMA), an extension of Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA), allows to record time-stamped geographic location information for behavioral data in the every-day environments of study participants. Considering that GEMA studies are continually gaining the attention of researchers and currently there is no single approach in collecting GEMA data, in this paper, we propose and present a GEMA architecture that can be used to conduct any GEMA study based on our experience developing and maintaining the Postpartum Mothers Mobile Study (PMOMS). Our GEMA client-server architecture can be customized to meet the specific requirements of each GEMA study. Key features of our proposed GEMA architecture include: utilization of widely used smartphones to make GEMA studies practical; alleviation of the burden of activities on participants by designing clients (mobile applications) that are very lightweight and servers that are heavyweight in terms of functionality; utilization of at least one positioning sensor to determine EMA contexts marked with locations; and communication through the Internet. We believe that our proposed GEMA architecture, with the illustrated foundation for GEMA studies in our exemplar study (PMOMS), will help researchers from any field conduct GEMA studies efficiently and effectively.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA)
• geographically-explicit Ecological Momentary Assessment (GEMA)
• location-Based Services
• mobile Data Collection
• real-Time Data Capture

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Bradley Wheeler for providing feedback on the first draft of the manuscript.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Authors’ Contributions

Pedram Gharani was responsible for developing and maintaining PMOMS, writing, and editing. Hassan A. Karimi was responsible for compiling and organizing information, writing, and editing. All authors were responsible for writing, editing, and final approval of the manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

This study is funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (R01HL135218; Principal Investigator: Dara D. Mendez);National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute [R01HL135218];