Jeroen Ooms*, UCLA, Los Angeles, United States Nithya Ramanathan, UCLA, Los Angeles, United States Joshua Selsky, UCLA, Los Angeles, United States Hongsuda Tangmunarunkit, UCLA, Los Angeles, United States Hossein Falaki, UCLA, Los Angeles, United States Jenkins John, UCLA, Los Angeles, United States Cameron Ketcham, UCLA, Los Angeles, United States Brent Longstaff, UCLA, Los Angeles, United States Mohamad Monibi, UCLA, Los Angeles, United States Kannan Parameswaran, UCLA, Los Angeles, United States Deborah Estrin, UCLA, Los Angeles, United States Track: Practice Presentation Topic: Mobile & Tablet Health Applications Presentation Type: Oral presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Building: Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School Room: Auditorium Date: 2012-09-16 02:00 PM – 02:45 PM Last modified: 2012-09-10

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Today's smartphones can create reliable and valid records of behaviors by autonomously and unobtrusively providing continuous, time-stamped, location and activity information for use by researchers, health care providers and patients across a broad range of health conditions. We have developed an flexible open source platofrm for real-time exploration of individual behavioral exposures. We implemented three self-monitoring functions on GPS- and accelerometer-equipped smartphones to monitor three specific behaviors: diet, exercise, and stress.

Monitoring behaviors like diet, exercise, and stress can reduce risk factors for numerous chronic diseases including cardiovascular disease and diabetes, however traditional retrospective self-reports are subject to recall error and bias; paper-based monitoring is easily delayed or ignored; biomarkers require lab preparation; and human-mediated feedback is time-intensive and costly. To avoid these sources of error and delay, ecological momentary assessment (EMA) was developed to monitor affect and behavior in real time in a person’s natural environment. The GPS, accelerometer, and computing capabilities on smartphones can significantly increase the power of EMA by providing information on where a person has been and what they were doing there.

We are extending the current capacity of EMA by integrating and validating the use of three functions which can improve the cost-effectiveness, timeliness, reliability and validity of self-monitoring. First, EMA is expanded to include an automated activity trace, which is a continuous log of a participant's exercise-related activities (standing, walking, running, biking, driving). The activity trace is computed using location and acceleration traces from the Global Positioning System (GPS), RF communications (e.g. wifi, cell tower), and accelerometer available on smartphones. Second, we have expanded on the current scheduling schemes for launching EMA probes. In addition to existing probe schedules based on a fixed or random interval, we have added location-based probes to prompt participants to document diet, stress, or exercise at a specific location. Third, utilizing the probe structure (fixed, random, location), we are providing real-time feedback to participants on their assessed behaviors (e.g. diet, stress, exercise). Real-time feedback provides comparisons of current behaviors to established base-rates. Each of the three proposed functions is designed to improve the validity and reliability of self-monitoring, compliance to the EMA, and provide the groundwork for cognitive behavioral interventions. Our analysis will evaluate these goals. Together, these innovative tracking services have the potential to significanly shift the methods available to self-monitoring, and more generally for sustainable behavior change interventions.

We will present preliminary results from three research studies conducted using the ohmage platform with a variety of populations including young moms and recent breast cancer survivors. More than 85% of the diverse set of participants who responded to exit surveys claim they would use ohmage for further personal behavior discovery, indicating a high level of engagement and satisfaction with the ohmage platform.