Sensor-Based Mobile App for Assessment and Tracking (SMAAT): Cross-Sectional Usability Study

Smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) is increasingly used in digital health research to capture behaviors, symptoms, and psychological states in real time and in natural environments, offering advantages over traditional retrospective measures in terms of ecological validity and reduced recall bias. Despite the potential of EMA for advancing mobile health and digital phenotyping apps, accessible technical solutions that enable researchers without software engineering expertise to design and deploy EMA studies remain limited.

This study aimed to (1) describe the development and core features of a sensor-based mobile app for assessment and tracking (SMAAT), a research platform for designing and deploying mobile surveys and EMA studies, and (2) report initial usability findings from a cross-sectional study using a novel swiping response format.

SMAAT consists of a web-based dashboard for researchers and companion iOS (Apple Inc) and Android (Google) apps for participants, providing a visual survey builder, multiple notification schedules (including fixed, random, interval, event-based, and geofenced prompts), gamification mechanics, and tools to monitor participant compliance. To evaluate the platform in use, we conducted a between-participants cross-sectional study in which 97 university students and 132 online panel participants completed blocks of binary questions on smartphones using either a swiping or tapping response format, followed by usability and user-experience questionnaires.

In the cross-sectional study, SMAAT supported successful study setup, enrollment, and survey completion across both iOS and Android devices without major technical problems, and participants in both samples completed the full protocol in a single session. Performance on the binary tasks was generally high, with swiping and tapping showing broadly comparable response-time and accuracy patterns, and no clear disadvantages for swiping or consistent effects of response orientation. Usability and pragmatic user-experience ratings were high across conditions, with no meaningful differences between swiping and tapping, while Prolific participants reported higher usability and pragmatic quality than students. Hedonic ratings descriptively favored swiping, although this difference did not reach conventional statistical significance.

SMAAT is a flexible smartphone-based research platform for configuring and deploying mobile surveys and EMA studies with diverse item types and notification logics. Initial findings show that SMAAT can support reliable cross-sectional data collection across heterogeneous devices and samples, and that a swipe-based response format can be implemented without compromising task performance, usability, or pragmatic user experience relative to tapping.