You are a researcher or physician and you are interested in the behaviour or emotion of people. With the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), you can get immediate feedback on how your selected study population functions in ‘normal’ everyday life. By using the PsyMate™ app you can easily incorporate ESM in your research project. Your subjects download the app on their phones from the App (iOS) or Play Store (Android). Your questionnaires are fine-tuned in collaboration with the specialised PsyMate™ programmers. When connected to the internet data gets sent directly to a database which makes it easy to analyse. The app is suitable for very large study populations, but also for the so-called n = 1 studies. This is particularly interesting for medical studies because you are able to measure the influence of medication, pain or stressors on the participants’ daily functioning. Even when you don’t belong to the medical community there are possibilities for research on the crossroads of behaviour, emotion and (social) context.

The PsyMate™ has some important practical properties: it is easy to use, capable of storing all the data (no internet connection needed once logged in to your study) and it can be programmed in a way that it is interactive (responsive to user input). The data is stored immediately, allowing it to be automatically analysed and shown in a graphical way. The PsyMate™ is suitable for use as a monitoring device for long stretches of time, because it is less intense and time-consuming for the user than any pen-and-paper method whatsoever.

The PsyMate™ app was developed by the Department of Psychiatry at Maastricht UMC + as a means to get to grips on psychological problems in everyday life. Programs involving depression, bipolar disorder and psychosis have been thoroughly and scientifically tested. The ambitions are high with development plans in terms of, among other things, Parkinson’s disease, pain, cardiology, hypertension, diabetes and Irritable Bowel Syndrome. We invite fellow scientists to help us expand the possibilities of the PsyMate™.

We emphasize that individual PsyMate™ data remain strictly personal. In scientific research respondents give informed consent allowing the researchers to use the data in their studies. Individual patient data remains anonymous and are never shared with third parties.