title: BeMonitored: Monitoring psychophysiology and behavior using Android in phobias.
abstract: It is of the utmost importance that researchers can recreate, as accurately as possible, real-life conditions in psychological studies. However, that is not always possible. Given that phobias are rather context-specific, their study is the ideal candidate to assess the feasibility of using a mobile and wearable device for obtaining physiological and behavioral data. In this article, we propose BeMonitored, a smartphone-based solution to support more ecologically valid monitoring of psychological experiments. BeMonitored delivers customizable, specific context-dependent audiovisual stimuli and uses external resources connected via Bluetooth or a smartphone's own resources, while capturing the participant's behavior, physiology, and environment. We used BeMonitored in a spider phobia case study and showed that spider phobics differed from control participants in face motion, captured by the smartphone camera. Moreover, our results also revealed heart rate differences between spider and neutral stimuli in phobic participants. The presented results emphasize the usefulness of smartphones for phobia monitoring. Considering their intrinsic characteristics, smartphones may constitute the natural evolution from the lab to more realistic contexts.
authors.affiliation: Instituto de Engenharia Electrónica e Informática de Aveiro (IEETA), Universidade de Aveiro, Campus Universitário de Santiago, 3810-193, Aveiro, Portugal. susana.bras@ua.pt.|Departamento de Electrónica, Telecomunicações e Informática, Universidade de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal. susana.bras@ua.pt.
authors.forename: Susana
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-8650-9219
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Brás
authors.affiliation: Center for Health Technology and Services Research (CINTESIS), Department of Education, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal.|Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Division of Psychology, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden.
authors.forename: Sandra C
authors.initials: SC
authors.lastname: Soares
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Electrónica, Telecomunicações e Informática, Universidade de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal.
authors.forename: Ricardo
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Moreira
authors.affiliation: Instituto de Engenharia Electrónica e Informática de Aveiro (IEETA), Universidade de Aveiro, Campus Universitário de Santiago, 3810-193, Aveiro, Portugal.|Departamento de Electrónica, Telecomunicações e Informática, Universidade de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal.
authors.forename: José M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Fernandes
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000818:Animals; D001519:Behavior; D040421:Cell Phone; D005149:Facial Expression; D005240:Feasibility Studies; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008991:Monitoring, Physiologic / Q000379:methods*; D010698:Phobic Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D013112:Spiders; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Behavior; Mobile device; Online monitoring; Psychophysiology; Spider phobia