Introducing FRED: Software for Generating Feedback Reports for Ecological Momentary Assessment Data

Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research, vol. 51, pp. 490–500

Abstract

Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) is a data collection approach utilizing smartphone applications or wearable devices to gather insights into daily life. EMA has advantages over traditional surveys, such as increasing ecological validity. However, especially prolonged data collection can burden participants by disrupting their everyday activities. Consequently, EMA studies can have comparably high rates of missing data and face problems of compliance. Giving participants access to their data via accessible feedback reports, as seen in citizen science initiatives, may increase participant motivation. Existing frameworks to generate such reports focus on single individuals in clinical settings and do not scale well to large datasets. Here, we introduce FRED (Feedback Reports on EMA Data) to tackle the challenge of providing personalized reports to many participants. FRED is an interactive online tool in which participants can explore their own personalized data reports. We showcase FRED using data from the WARN-D study, where 867 participants were queried for 85 consecutive days with four daily and one weekly survey, resulting in up to 352 observations per participant. FRED includes descriptive statistics, time-series visualizations, and network analyses on selected EMA variables. Participants can access the reports online as part of a Shiny app, developed via the R programming language. We make the code and infrastructure of FRED available in the hope that it will be useful for both research and clinical settings, given that it can be flexibly adapted to the needs of other projects with the goal of generating personalized data reports.

Authors 5

1. Aljoscha Rimpler corresponding Aachen Department of Clinical Psychology

   Leiden University · University of Groningen

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Clinical Psychology, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands. aljoscharimpler@gmail.com

   Department of Psychometrics and Statistics, University Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands. aljoscharimpler@gmail.com

   Department of Psychometrics and Statistics, University Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands

2. Björn Sebastian Siepe

   Philipps University of Marburg

   Affiliation as printed

   Psychological Methods Lab, Department of Psychology, Philipps-University Marburg, Marburg, Germany

3. Carlotta Rieble Aachen Department of Clinical Psychology

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Clinical Psychology, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands

4. Ricarda K. K. Proppert Aachen Department of Clinical Psychology

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Clinical Psychology, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands

5. Eiko I. Fried Aachen Department of Clinical Psychology

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Clinical Psychology, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands