Fall Research Expo 2020

PennAWARE: A Novel Application for Studying Stress Responding in Daily Life

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As a part of the Penn Undergraduate Research Mentorship program (PURM), I was given the opportunity to work on an open source app for an upcoming study at Penn. The study’s goal is to understand how college students’ stress reactions unfold in real time. In order to do this, the app needed to collect passive sensing data from sensors in students’ smartphones as well as send Experience Sampling Method (ESM) surveys several times a day asking students questions about their experiences following stressful events in their daily lives. 

In order to collect these data, the researchers hoped to employ tools from the AWARE Framework, an open source framework that collects passive sensing data from certain phone sensors and sends custom ESM surveys for users to complete throughout the day. However, the app’s current format was not entirely conducive to the study’s goals. 

First, the study required additional functionality that would allow for a follow-up ESM survey: a secondary survey that arrives a fixed number of minutes after an initial survey. Second, the study required that the app be able to pull answers from the initial survey into the follow-up survey. Third, the app required several modifications to ensure that surveys would arrive at times which were convenient for the user. One of these changes was the addition of user-inputted bedtime and wake-time values. With the addition of the user’s bedtime and wake-time hours, the app can automatically send surveys at evenly spaced intervals throughout the user’s day, instead of researchers setting general hours for all participants that might not work with everyone’s schedule. This change was important for minimizing the number of missed surveys throughout the course of the study. Other changes to reduce missing data included (a) adding a reminder notification for each survey and (b) allowing users to extend the survey submission window by 5 minutes if extra time is needed. As the sole programmer on the research team, I was responsible for making all of these changes to AWARE to prepare the app for the stress reactions study. 

This poster gives an overview of the changes made to the app, as well as the findings from a pilot ESM study conducted through PennAWARE.

 

PRESENTED BY
Sara S
PURM - Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program
Engineering & Applied Sciences 2023
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Advised By
Anna Franklin
Ayelet Ruscio
Dr.
https://web.sas.upenn.edu/ruscio-lab/
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PRESENTED BY
Sara S
PURM - Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program
Engineering & Applied Sciences 2023
View Profile
Advised By
Anna Franklin
Ayelet Ruscio
Dr.
https://web.sas.upenn.edu/ruscio-lab/

Comments

This is really great! Can you tell me more about the study that the app is going to be helping with? Will all Penn students be using the app? Also, does a student put in their bedtime every day, or can they set it and forget it? What is an example of a "signal"?

I really enjoyed your presentation! It was very clear and easy to understand. I would also like to know more about what this upcoming study is about. What exactly is the study focusing on? Also, how do you determine/find the participants for this survey?

I really enjoyed your presentation! It was very clear and easy to understand. I would also like to know more about what this upcoming study is about. What exactly is the study focusing on? Also, how do you determine/find the participants for this survey?

I really enjoyed your presentation! It was very clear and easy to understand. I would also like to know more about what this upcoming study is about. What exactly is the study focusing on? Also, how do you determine/find the participants for this survey?

This is really interesting and seems like a novel technology. My question is, how is the app different from say a fitness tracker? What are the advantages to having a smartphone app tracking stress responses instead of more wearable technologies that presumably would be more accurate? 

This is a fascinating project and study. It's really cool how modern technology and apps could be employed in the research process in ways that time-and-space limited surveys cannot. How does the app capture and measure 'stress'? Can people indicate what they perceive to be the source of that stress/emotional response?

I thought this project was really cool and want to see results from Penn students' responses! Who were the participants for the pilot study, and in the future as part of the large sample, who will be participating?

I found the work you were doing fascinating when you talked about it during a lab meeting, and I'm so excited to see the final poster. Will you be continuing to work with Anna on the app?

I found the work you were doing fascinating when you talked about it during a lab meeting, and I'm so excited to see the final poster. Will you be continuing to work with Anna on the app?