Jeeves - an Experience Sampling study creation tool

Abstract

Ubiquitous mobile technology affords clinicians new opportunities to enhance personalised, patient-centric care remotely, easing the burden on both patient and clinician. The Experience Sampling Method (ESM) involves the repeated assessment of patients on their symptoms or behaviours, and their external contexts, as they go about their everyday lives, enhancing ecological validity and minimising recall bias. While previously conducted with paper diaries, ESM smartphone applications are now being employed, that have a range of benefits over paper-based methods including the ability to scale to many more patients. However, development of such applications is time-consuming and requires considerable programming knowledge. This has prompted the development of ESM creation tools that alleviate a researcher from the burden of programming an ESM application from scratch. This paper presents our work on Jeeves, a visual environment for creating secure ESM Android applications, and a usability evaluation we conducted with health psychology students.