Using TEMPEST: End-user programming of web-based ecological momentary assessment protocols

Researchers who perform Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) studies tend to rely on informatics experts to set up and administer their data collection protocols with digital media. Contrary to standard surveys and questionnaires that are supported by widely available tools, setting up an EMA protocol is a substantial programming task. Apart from constructing the survey items themselves, researchers also need to design, implement, and test the timing and the contingencies by which these items are presented to respondents. Furthermore, given the wide availability of smartphones, it is becoming increasingly important to execute EMA studies on user-owned devices, which presents a number of software engineering challenges pertaining to connectivity, platform independence, persistent storage, and back-end control. We discuss TEMPEST, a web-based platform that is designed to support non-programmers in specifying and executing EMA studies. We discuss the conceptual model it presents to end-users, through an example of use, and its evaluation by 18 researchers who have put it to real-life use in 13 distinct research studies.