Reintroducing the Effortless Assessment Research System (EARS)

Abstract

This paper reintroduces the Effortless Assessment Research System (EARS), 4 years and 10,000 participants after its initial launch. EARS is a mobile sensing tool that affords researchers the opportunity to collect naturalistic, behavioral data via participants’ naturalistic smartphone use. The first section of the paper highlights improvements made to EARS via a tour of EARS’s capabilities—the most important of which is the expansion of EARS to the iOS operating system. 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, the enrollment of participants, and the tracking of participants. The second section of the paper goes behind the scenes to describe 3 challenges faced by the EARS developers—remote participant enrollment and tracking, keeping EARS running in the background, 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 followup period. They were instructed to keep the app running while using their phone naturalistically.…”

“…There are important ethical considerations associated with the collection of mobile sensing data. Passive smartphone data in this study were collected using the Effortless Assessment Research System (EARS) app (Lind et al., 2023; Lind, Byrne, Wicks, Smidt, & Allen, 2018), which was developed and maintained by Ksana Health. Participants received verbal and written information about EARS before providing consent or assent.…”

“…More detailed information about steps taken to protect participants' privacy can be found in Lind et al. (2018, 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.…”

“…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…”