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This past year, movisens placed great value on a more sustainable design of the entire value chain. We significantly reduced the use of plastics and substantially cut transport emissions. In order to end the year striving for improved sustainability, we came up with something new for our Christmas campaign this year.

movisens would like to use this year's Christmas campaign to make a positive contribution to environmental issues. For this purpose, we selected three sustainable projects that require support in the coming year. Our newsletter subscribers had the possibility to give their vote for one of three sustainable projects.

The first donation would go to the Nature Conservation Southern Palatinate Association which is committed to the restoration of the cultural landscape and the protection of the native biodiversity.
Secondly, we selected the regional group of the Economy for the common good in Karlsruhe. A donation would support the implementation of an ecological, social and economic balance sheet within regional small and medium-size enterprises.
Last but not least a donation for the organization “Stop Talking Start Planting” would support children planting a million trees in order to achieve a positive Co2 balance.

movisens proudly announces our new sales partner Brain Vision LLC.
Brain Vision now distributes our range of sensors across North America.
We're looking forward to a successful partnership.

movisens is now an official partner of the „Young Academics“ of the German Association for Sports Science (DVS).
As leader for mobile sensor technology, movisens has provided universities and research institutions with the latest technology for over 10 years, and supports scientists in their quest for new knowledge.

We are looking forward to presenting our innovative sensor solutions for Ambulatory Assessment and Mobile Monitoring at the upcoming DVS young talents workshops and to regularly inform them about the developments at movisens.

We would like to thank the "Young Acadmics" committee for this great opportunity for continued cooperation.
Further information about the work of the DVS "Young Academics" commission can be found on the corresponding website: Young Academics“.

Dear customers, dearest researchers,

In challenging times like these, we’d like to take a moment to wish you personally, your families, your colleagues and your study participant’s good health. We here at movisens remain available for you even in the current crisis. Please feel free to contact us with any questions regarding ongoing or planned studies. Together, we will find the optimal solution to keep some things moving forward in this difficult situation.
Presently we’re all working from home and trying to make the best out of this challenging situation. Therefore we have thought about how we can support you in the best possible way. In addition, we prepared some tips to give you and your study participants to allow you to continue your research projects.

Learn more about the possibilities that movisens currently offers you

movisens presents the DataProcessing Service – a service that spares you the time and hassle of cleaning and processing your data.
The movisens experts process physiological as well as subjective data as required, to move you quickly in to the statistical phase of your study.

Learn more about the services of the movisens DataProcessing Service

Over the next few months we're going to be running a few long form articles on the news blog along with our regular news updates and product launches. For the first series of articles, we're going to talk a little bit about the origins of Ambulatory Assessment, it's development with technological advances, and some of the exciting future research possibilities that it allows. We hope you enjoy!

Ambulatory Assessment

A short summary of the current methodologies

Studying people in their natural habitat is no longer exclusively the domain of anthropologists in the wild. The jungle and the savannah no longer resemble the day to day experiences of modern urban dwelling homo-sapiens. However the legacy of our past is still locked within our psyche, and unravelling our psychological nature involves researchers utilizing new methods to delve deeper in to our minds and bodies.

The overarching ‘umbrella’ for all of the following research methods is Ambulatory Assessment. Whether you’re performing an Ecological Momentary Assessment or Experience Sampling study, they fall within the scope of Ambulatory Assessment.

The core idea of Ambulatory Assessment is to track parameters outside of the laboratory or clinic. Using electronic diaries and/or physiological sensors, researchers can cast aside the inaccuracy of patient reporting and gain valid real time or near real time data. Data not contaminated by the fallibility of participant recollection or miss reporting, and this allowed researchers a purer glimpse of the “… rich information about the daily lives of individuals who may be studied or treated by clinical scientists and mental health professionals.” (Trull & Ebner-Priemer, 2013)

The best and most concise definition of Ambulatory Assessment comes from the Society for Ambulatory Assessment website:

“Ambulatory Assessment comprises the use of field methods to assess the ongoing behavior, physiology, experience and environmental aspects of people in naturalistic or unconstrained settings. Ambulatory Assessment uses ecologically-valid tools to understand biopsychosocial processes as they unfold naturally in time and in context.”

Whilst Experience Sampling and Ecological Momentary Assessment and Daily Diary Studies are components of Ambulatory Assessment, this term often conjures Physiological Monitoring to mind. Research papers that cite Ambulatory Assessment in their keywords often utilize accelerometers, ECG, and other physiological parameters as the core data in their study.

So that brings us on to Ecological Momentary Assessment and Experience Sampling, two of the key components of Ambulatory Assessment, and just like Ambulatory Assessment, Ecological Momentary Assessment doesn’t really sound that catchy. Now, there’s a subtle difference between EMA and Experience Sampling. First I’ll pass it over to Reed Larson and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to recite the abstract from their 1983 article that defined the Experience Sampling Method:

“…the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), a research procedure that consists of asking individuals to provide systematic self-reports at random occasions during the waking hours of a normal week....The ESM obtains information about the private as well as the public aspects of individuals' lives, secures data about behavioral and intrapsychic aspects of daily activity, and obtains reports about people's experiences as they occur, thereby minimizing the effects of reliance on memory and reconstruction.”

Whilst gathering information from people during their daily lives is the primary role of Experience Sampling, the term has become used to describe gathering subjective data over time even within the laboratory or clinical setting. Now, let’s get back to Ecological Momentary Assessment. To perform great craftsmanship, a tradesman requires good tools, and for the researcher Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) is an incredibly powerful longitudinal study tool for harnessing subjective data in day to day life. The subtle difference between EMA and ESM (experience sampling methodology) lies in the origins of the two methods. EMA emerged out of the field of behavioral medicine, and as a result often includes physiological parameters or health related questions, and is primarily performed in a person’s day to day normal environment.

In the next part of this series, we’ll delve in to the advantages and drawbacks of Ambulatory Assessment, and discuss the impact of developing technology.

SedentaryMood-Study (Part VII)

The following article is part of a series about the "SedentaryMood-Study".

In the last article the practical implementation of the study was described. In the following and last blog post the result of the study is presented.

Result

The results indicate that there is a significant negative influence on the mood dimension alertness-fatigue and on the good-bad mood. In general terms, this means that sedentary behaviour contributes to higher fatigue. Sedenary units (≥ 30 minutes) in which no interruption took place have a particularly negative effect compared to interrupted units.
With regard to the good-bad mood, the results also point to a significant negative influence of sedentary time. This means that the sedentary time can contribute to a worse mood. Especially negative is the effect of the sedentary units (≥ 30 minutes), in contrast to interrupted sedentary units, on the good-bad mood.

movisens heads abroad to Canada for the 58th annual meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research. The meeting takes place in the Quebec convention centre from the 3rd to the 7th of October. We'll display our unique combination of physiological sensors and experience sampling software, with a key focus on the integration of the two platforms. We look forward to seeing some of our existing customers there, and meeting researchers keen to explore this nascent field.

Amongst a whole array of interesting talks, we're particularly looking forward to the Heart Rate Variability symposium from Julian Thayer on Saturday the 7th. We'd like to extend a warm welcome to all the delegates, and invite them to drop by our table and have a chat about what psychophysiological solutions we can provide for their research.