Reintroducing the Effortless Assessment Research System (EARS) (Preprint)

Abstract

UNSTRUCTURED This paper re-introduces the Effortless Assessment Research System (EARS), four years and 4,000 participants after its initial launch. EARS is a mobile sensing tool that affords researchers the opportunity to collect naturalistic, behavioral data via participants’ normal smartphone use. The first section of the paper highlights improvements made to EARS via a tour of EARS’s capabilities across iOS and Android. The most important improvement is the expansion of EARS to iOS. Other improvements include better keyboard integration for the collection of typed text, full control of survey design and administration for research teams, and the addition of a researcher-facing EARS dashboard, which facilitates survey design, enrollment of participants, and tracking of participants. The second section of the paper goes behind the scenes to describe three challenges faced by the EARS developers –remote participant enrollment and tracking, keeping EARS running on participant phones, and continuous attention and effort toward data protection– and how those challenges shaped the design of the app.

The effects of family support and smartphone-derived homestay on daily mood and depression among sexual and gender minority adolescents.

“…Participants also completed self-report measures assessing psychiatric symptoms and risk factors for depression. Additionally, at baseline, participants installed the Effortless Assessment Research Systems (EARS; Lind et al, 2023) app on their personal smartphone, which was used to assess daily mood and acquire geolocation data during the 6-month follow-up period.…”

Detecting Adolescent Depression Through Passive Monitoring of Linguistic Markers in Smartphone Communication

“…At a baseline visit, participants completed the Kiddie Schedule for Affect Disorders and Schizophrenia (K-SADS-PL; Kaufman et al, 1997) to assess lifetime DSM-5 disorders and the two-subtest form of the WASI-II to assess IQ. Next, participants downloaded the Effortless Assessment Research System (EARS) application (Lind et al, 2018(Lind et al, , 2023 onto their personal smartphone to collect keyboard inputs over a 12-month follow-up period. They were instructed to keep the app running while using their phone naturalistically.…”

“…Passive smartphone data in this study were collected using the Effortless Assessment Research System (EARS) app (Lind et al, 2018(Lind et al, , 2023, which was developed and maintained by Ksana Health. Participants received verbal and written information about EARS before providing consent or assent.…”

“…Other parties involved in data collection and storage (e.g., Ksana Health) did not have access to the data. More detailed information about steps taken to protect participants' privacy can be found in Lind et al (2018Lind et al ( , 2023 and at https://ksanahealth.com/privacy-policy/. De-identified data from this study were submitted to the National Data Archive (NDA) in compliance with the National Institute of Mental Health's Data Sharing Policy.…”

Capturing mood dynamics through adolescent smartphone social communication.

“…In particular, we were interested in prospective prediction of mood by language because the ability to predict near-future changes in mood would be a foundational step toward unobtrusive monitoring and detection. To passively acquire naturalistic social communication, we used a novel smartphone app, the Effortless Assessment Research System (EARS; Lind et al, 2018Lind et al, , 2022, that collected all keyboard inputs across app platforms over a 90-day period. Within the same timeframe, mood ratings for the past day were collected each day via EARS.…”