m-Path: An easy-to-use and highly tailorable platform for ecological momentary assessment and intervention in behavioral research and clinical practice

Abstract

In this paper, we present m-Path (www.m-Path.io), an online platform that provides a user-friendly and flexible framework for implementing smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) and intervention (EMI) in both research and clinical practice in the context of blended care. Because real-time monitoring and intervention in people’s everyday lives have unparalleled benefits compared to traditional data collection techniques (e.g., experiments or retrospective surveys), EMA and EMI have become popular in recent years. On the one hand, the surge in use of these methods requires software that allows for increasingly complex designs and functionalities. On the other hand, EMA and EMI platforms should remain easy to use and accessible for researchers and clinicians with limited programming skills. m-Path accommodates to both of these needs, offering an intuitive web interface to set up highly tailorable smartphone-based EMA and EMI protocols. In this article, we review the strengths of daily life data collection and intervention in general and m-Path in particular. We discuss the regular workflow to design an EMA or EMI protocol within the m-Path framework, and summarize both the basic functionalities and more advanced features of our software.