Investigating Receptivity and Affect Using Machine Learning: Ecological Momentary Assessment and Wearable Sensing Study

Abstract

Background As mobile health (mHealth) studies become increasingly productive owing to the advancements in wearable and mobile sensor technology, our ability to monitor and model human behavior will be constrained by participant receptivity. Many health constructs are dependent on subjective responses, and without such responses, researchers are left with little to no ground truth to accompany our ever-growing biobehavioral data. This issue can significantly impact the quality of a study, particularly for populations known to exhibit lower compliance rates. To address this challenge, researchers have proposed innovative approaches that use machine learning (ML) and sensor data to modify the timing and delivery of surveys. However, an overarching concern is the potential introduction of biases or unintended influences on participants’ responses when implementing new survey delivery methods. Objective This study aims to demonstrate the potential impact of an ML-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) delivery system (using receptivity as the predictor variable) on the participants’ reported emotional state. We examine the factors that affect participants’ receptivity to EMAs in a 10-day wearable and EMA–based emotional state–sensing mHealth study. We study the physiological relationships indicative of receptivity and affect while also analyzing the interaction between the 2 constructs. Methods We collected data from 45 healthy participants wearing 2 devices measuring electrodermal activity, accelerometer, electrocardiography, and skin temperature while answering 10 EMAs daily, containing questions about perceived mood. Owing to the nature of our constructs, we can only obtain ground truth measures for both affect and receptivity during responses. Therefore, we used unsupervised and supervised ML methods to infer affect when a participant did not respond. Our unsupervised method used k-means clustering to determine the relationship between physiology and receptivity and then inferred the emotional state during nonresponses. For the supervised learning method, we primarily used random forest and neural networks to predict the affect of unlabeled data points as well as receptivity. Results Our findings showed that using a receptivity model to trigger EMAs decreased the reported negative affect by >3 points or 0.29 SDs in our self-reported affect measure, scored between 13 and 91. The findings also showed a bimodal distribution of our predicted affect during nonresponses. This indicates that this system initiates EMAs more commonly during states of higher positive emotions. Conclusions Our results showed a clear relationship between affect and receptivity. This relationship can affect the efficacy of an mHealth study, particularly those that use an ML algorithm to trigger EMAs. Therefore, we propose that future work should focus on a smart trigger that promotes EMA receptivity without influencing affect during sampled time points.