Challenges and opportunities of mobile data collection in clinical studies

The advancement in mobile technologies, especially smartphones, has brought a huge change to data collection methods in recent years. The ubiquity of smartphones makes them a useful tool for collecting data in real-time. Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) is an effective data collection method that involves repeated sampling of an individual's behavior, symptoms, and experiences in real-time in their natural environment, maximizing ecological validity. However, the burden that smartphone-based EMA imposes on individuals could result in high numbers of dropouts and limit its use in research and clinical practice. Investigating and identifying the reasons and factors that contribute to the individual's dropout could highly benefit the outcomes of EMA studies. This study applies the Model of Technology Appropriation (MTA) as a theoretical lens to explain the process of individual's appropriation of smartphones for the EMA data collection. We report the results of our user study on a group of volunteers.