Turn everyday smartphones into research instruments
SMAAT (Sensor-based Mobile Application for Assessment and Tracking) lets you design studies, schedule experience sampling, and collect encrypted survey and sensor data from iOS and Android participants — with real-time compliance dashboards, participant engagement tools, and a validated item library built in.
Designed for
Academia, health, and industry
Data streams
Self-report, GPS, accelerometer, background
Security
Public/private key encryption
The participant app: enrolled studies, the surveys waiting for them, progress, and messages from your team — all on their own phone.
Built & used in research at
University of KonstanzExperimental Psychology & Internet ScienceAbout the team →Student sponsorship
Writing a Bachelor’s or Master’s thesis? SMAAT is free.
Tell us about your project and we grant a full paid plan for the length of your study — no cost, no credit card.
Built for modern digital research
From EMA and ESM to clinical monitoring and market insights, SMAAT connects your study design with participants’ smartphones and sensors.
Dynamic sampling with item library
Configure time-based, random, and event-based prompts, set quiet hours, and build surveys from a validated item library tagged by construct, so you can drag-and-drop pre-phrased questions instead of writing everything from scratch.
Real-time compliance monitoring
Monitor per-participant response rates by day, week, and survey type in a dedicated compliance dashboard, and receive automated email digests when adherence drops below your thresholds.
Participant engagement & gamification
Keep participants engaged with points, streaks, badges, progress bars, levels, missions, leaderboards, team goals, and optional narrative modes that make intensive protocols easier to stick with.
Built around two kinds of study
SMAAT is a general-purpose research platform, but the scheduling, sensing, and item tooling were built for the designs two fields run most often: momentary assessment of behavior in context, and intensive within-person sampling of everyday life.
Health behavior research
Measure health behavior where it happens
Physical activity, eating, drinking, sleep, medication adherence — captured at the moment and in the place they occur, not reconstructed from memory a week later.
- Geofence and place-visit prompts that fire at the gym, the clinic, or wherever the participant actually goes
- Passive steps, sleep, and heart data from HealthKit and Health Connect, timestamped alongside self-report
- Answer-contingent follow-ups that catch a lapse or a symptom flare while it is still happening
Social science research
Study social life as it actually unfolds
Situations, interactions, moods, and decisions sampled many times per person — the within-person designs that a single questionnaire cannot support.
- Seven scheduling modes, including sampling anchored to each participant's own wake and sleep times
- Cognitive tasks that run natively in the participant app — flanker, go/no-go, delay discounting, risky choice
- ESM power planning and a burden estimate before you field the design, not after
Also used for clinical monitoring, occupational and market research, and personal self-tracking — see the full feature set.
From study idea to encrypted dataset
Design your study
Define surveys, sensor streams, sampling schedule, and inclusion criteria in the web dashboard.
Enroll participants
Share study codes or links, let participants install the SMAAT app, and start receiving smartphone-based data.
Analyze and export
Track adherence dashboards, inspect time series, and export clean datasets for statistical analysis.
Start from a validated study design
Choose from ready-made templates spanning mental health, cognition, sleep, mobility, and more — with surveys, schedules, and sensor configurations already set up.
Use any template as a starting point and customize it to fit your protocol
Sign up to access all templates, clone them into your dashboard, and adapt surveys, schedules, and sensor configurations to your study.
SMAAT app for iOS and Android
Participants join your study through the SMAAT mobile app, available globally and translated into multiple languages to support cross-country research.
Global accessibility
SMAAT supports multiple interface languages so you can recruit diverse samples across regions.
Europe
Asia
Africa
Need another language for your cohort? Contact us to request language support.
Start your next smartphone-based study with SMAAT
Move from static questionnaires to rich, time-stamped, sensor-aware data — without building your own app from scratch.