Project Title: Ecological Momentary Assessment using mobile technologies
Background
Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) approaches are used to understand behaviour and the behavioural context in real time. Conducting EMA research on physical activity and diet behaviours is important as behaviour is often shaped by the momentary environment as well as current emotions and feeling states. Due to technological developments such research can now be carried out with smartphones leveraging on their capabilities to collect data in various ways: asking questions through applications, sensing movement, collecting location data etc.
Following the creation of an EMA questions catalogues that is based on extensive qualitative interviews that took place over 6 months we have implemented EMA-type methods in a number of projects (e.g. Continuous Glucose Monitoring, digital food marketing). This helped us to refine our strategy for our Health@NUS project which utilises mobile phone technology and activity trackers to examine lifestyle behaviors and their determinants in real-time (to be discussed in an another section). The question catalogue can be used for all kinds of EMA studies as questions are flexible. This work did not directly lead to insights into the interactions between individuals and environments related to diet and physical activity. It enables us to conduct insight-generating studies.
Last updated Feb 21, 2022