Free Technical Solutions for Ecological Momentary Assessments - Searching GitHub plus Google

Smartphones are increasingly being used to deliver healthcare services and to conduct medical research using apps. The emerging field is also called mobile health (mHealth). Many specific data collection strategies have been developed for medical data to mitigate biases of more traditional methods (e.g., the recall bias). In the larger context, the aim is to collect data in realtime and real-life, also referred to as data with higher ecological validity. One strategy that is particularly prominent is called Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMA). Even if other data collection strategies are used, they are usually combined with EMA. For this purpose, scientists are faced with the problem of having to locate a technical mHealth platform supporting EMA. To simplify this task, we conducted a search on GitHub and applied the PRISMA guidelines, with the goal of identifying current platforms and frameworks that can be used freely and support on-premise installations. In addition, we did a Google search to see if there are frameworks that meet the above criteria, but are not published on GitHub. The results show that despite great popularity in the scientific community, only few freely available EMA platforms and frameworks exist.