Besides passive sensing, ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) are one of the primary methods to collect in-the-moment data in ubiquitous computing and mobile health. While EMAs have the advantage of low recall bias, a disadvantage is that they frequently interrupt the user and thus long-term adherence is generally poor. In this paper, we propose a less-disruptive self-reporting method, "assisted recall," in which in the evening individuals are asked to answer questions concerning a moment from earlier in the day assisted by contextual information such as location, physical activity, and ambient sounds collected around the moment to be recalled. Such contextual information is automatically collected from phone sensor data, so that self-reporting does not require devices other than a smartphone. We hypothesized that providing assistance based on such automatically collected contextual information would increase recall accuracy (i.e., if recall responses for a moment match the EMA responses at the same moment) as compared to no assistance, and we hypothesized that the overall completion rate of evening recalls (assisted or not) would be higher than for in-the-moment EMAs. We conducted a two-week study (N=54) where participants completed recalls and EMAs each day. We found that providing assistance via contextual information increased recall accuracy by 5.6% (p = 0.032) and the overall recall completion rate was on average 27.8% (p < 0.001) higher than that of EMAs.
Keywords: Context-aware computing; EMA; ESM; engagement; episodic memory; experience sampling; interruption; mobile health; real-world study; recall; self-report adherence.