Real-time surveys and mobility tracking

The eCycle project from EHESP led by Guillaume Chevance will rely on Eco Emo tracker to perform mobility tracking and ecological momentary assessment.
The project aims to quantify the impact of e-bikes on travel behavior changes and health outcomes through a quasi-experimental longitudinal study and to conduct comprehensive health, economic, and environmental impact assessments of these loan programs. 

The INDEEP project is funded through the Doctoral Network framework of the European Union. It is coordinated by the Technological University of Shannon in Ireland (Kieran Dowd). It aims to develop “INtervention on the DEterminants of, and Expertise in, Physical activity behaviours”.

Within the INDEEP project, two studies will rely on Eco Emo tracker based on the expertise of Delfien Van Dyck from Ghent University. The first study explores the physical, social, and temporal contexts in which adolescents are physically active across five European countries (Belgium, Ireland, Norway, Germany, and Portugal). The second study focuses on the relationship between physical activity contexts and adolescents’ end-of-day affective well-being. 

The MAMBHA project funded by “Fonds National pour la Recherche” from Luxembourg involves a consortium established between Switzerland (UZH) and Luxembourg (Philippe Gerber, Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research).

The objective of the MAMBHA project (“Mapping real-life mobility and healthy aging: Longitudinal cohorts in Switzerland and Luxembourg”) is to examine the association and impact of diverse dimensions of daily mobility on healthy ageing (i.e., physical health, subjective well-being, social participation and cognition). The research asks how the various dimensions of mobility support ageing well. 

The recently updated Eco Emo tracker application now includes text formatting options for both smartphone and web versions of all questionnaires. Attract the attention of study participants to the critical aspects of the wording of survey questions! 

The COLIBRI-RISK project conducted by CHU Nice (Raphaëlle Varraso) is a pilot feasibility study embedded within the Colibri cohorts, which follow patients with chronic respiratory diseases, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma.

The primary objective of COLIBRI-RISK is to assess the feasibility, acceptability, and data quality of innovative tools designed to capture environmental, lifestyle, and exposome-related data in real-life conditions, in order to support the methodological development of a future large-scale etiological study on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma. 

This study explored how time-varying social contacts associate with momentary depressive symptoms among older adults in the Paris region, employing a geographically-explicit ecological momentary assessment approach (GEMA).

Eco Emo tracker was used to assess depressive symptomatology 3 times per day over 7 days.

Zou D, Fancello G, Montanari A, Zhou S, Chaix B. Momentary associations between time-varying social contacts and depressive symptomatology in older adults: A GPS-based mobility survey study. Soc Sci Med. 2026;389:118834. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2025.118834. 

The latest release of Eco Emo tracker offers new export features, including different data formats (such as unified or segmented formats).

Moreover, the export of data now automatically creates a codebook for the exported datasets. Detailed codebooks are created for the survey questions, response choices, specified conditions for question display, and every survey trigger. 

This study conducted in older adults examined how the social network characteristics of people relate to momentary depressive symptoms and their daily fluctuations. Findings from this study suggest that larger social networks and more in-person contact may promote more stable and better mental health among older adults.

Eco Emo tracker was used to evaluate depressive symptomatology 3 times per day over a week using smartphone surveys.

Cail V, Beenackers MA, Van Lenthe FJ, Oude Groeniger J, Fancello G, Montanari A, Sueur C, Kestens Y, Vallée J, Chaix B. Social network characteristics and levels of fluctuations in momentary depressive symptomatology among older adults. J Epidemiol Community Health. 2025 Oct 9;79(11):828-834. doi: 10.1136/jech-2024-222959. 

This study led by the Auckland University of Technology examined the associations between time-use behaviours (sedentary behaviour, light physical activity, moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, and sleep) and both evaluative wellbeing (life satisfaction) and experienced wellbeing (momentary happiness, anxiousness, and tiredness). The aim was to assess how reallocating time among behaviours could impact on wellbeing outcomes.

The Eco Emo tracker application was used to measure experienced wellbeing (or momentary affect) 3 times per day corresponding to 21 prompts over the observation week.

Narayanan A, Duncan S, Smith C, Le F, Mackay L, McPhee J, Chaix B, Stewart T. Daily time-use compositions of physical behaviours and its association with evaluative and experienced wellbeing: a multilevel compositional analysis. Int J Behav Nutr Phys Act. 2025;22(1):73. doi: 10.1186/s12966-025-01769-w. 

This study that applied geographically-explicit ecological momentary assessment investigated whether individuals’ momentary mental well-being is related to the exposure to micro-urban spaces along the daily mobility paths within the two previous hours; and it explored whether these associations differ when environmental exposures are defined considering all location points or only outdoor location points.

Eco Emo tracker was used to evaluate depressive symptomatology 3 times per day over a week using smartphone surveys.

Fancello, G., J. Vallée, C. Sueur, F.J. van Lenthe, Y. Kestens, A. Montanari, and B. Chaix, Micro urban spaces and mental well-being: Measuring the exposure to urban landscapes along daily mobility paths and their effects on momentary depressive symptomatology among older population. Environment International, 2023. 178: p. 108095.