Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) Using Digital Technologies in Clinical Psychology
Keywords:
Biosensors, clinical assessment, clinical psychology, ecological momentary assessment, experience sampling method, information and communication technologies, mobile devices, passive sensing, routine outcome monitoring, self-reports, sensors, smartphones, wearable devicesAbstract
Over the last years, Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) emerged as an alternative data collection strategy to repeatedly assess people in real-life, thus improving the ecological validity and reliability of data. As a matter of fact, the increasing field of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and the growing availability of smartphones in people’s lives allowed to further foster the potentiality of this approach, leading to the development of technology based EMA. So far, a huge amount of studies has shown the feasibility, acceptability and effectiveness of this procedure in many clinical fields. Nevertheless, EMA approach is still far from being applied to routine care. Beyond describing the advantages and potentialities of this approach starting from the available evidence-based literature, this chapter will focus on the issues that still need to be addressed in order to transfer the scientific knowledge from the research field to the clinical practice.
