PSIXPORT: Mobile App for Ecological Momentary Assessment of Psychological Dimensions in Sport Injury

Retrospective self-reports have been commonly used to assess psychological variables such as feelings, thoughts, or emotions. Nevertheless, this method presents serious limitations to gather accurate information about variables that change over time. The Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) approach has been used to deal with some of the limitations these retrospective assessment methods present, and for gathering real-time information about dynamic psychological variables, such as feelings, thoughts, or behaviors. In the sports injury rehabilitation context, athletes' thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and pain perceptions during the rehabilitation process can influence the outcomes of this process. These responses change over different stages of the rehabilitation and taking them into account can help therapists to adapt the rehabilitation process and increasing their effectiveness. With this aim, an EMA mobile app (PSIXPORT) was designed to gather real-time information about severely injured athletes' cognitive appraisals, emotional responses, behaviors, and pain perceptions during their rehabilitation process. The goals of this study were to evaluate Psixport's ability to gather real-time information about injured athletes' psychological responses during the rehabilitation, to test the users' perceived usability of Psixport, and to compare the reliability and differences between real-time data gathered with Psixport and the data gathered through the one-time retrospective method. Twenty-eight severely injured athletes (10 men and 18 women) were assessed using Psixport, a retrospective questionnaire, and the uMARS usability test. Results showed that Psixport can be considered as a good tool to gather information about injured athletes' cognitive appraisals, emotional responses, behaviors, and pain perceptions. Moreover, multiple data assessments gathered with the app showed to be more accurate information about injured athletes' psychological responses than one-time retrospective reports.