Over the past ten months, Tobias Wingen, Victor Estal Muñoz, Silvana Mareva, Pietro Marenco, Barbara Schmidt, David Thomson, Caroline Ott, and their Research Supervisor Dr Angelos Kassianos have been working hard on their project entitled Ecological Momentary Assessment of Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQoL) using a Smartphone Application.

Their endeavours to create a user-friendly smartphone application which measures real-life HRQoL, current activity, and mood have thus far included adapting the WHOQOL-BREF to real-life contexts, translating their application in six languages, and of course correcting coding errors after each trial run… among many other things. Their ultimate goal will be to compare HRQoL assessments made in real-time and ecological conditions to traditional ones, to determine if HRQoL can indeed be measured with a smartphone. Faced with the long road ahead, the team seems to be far from losing their spirit.

We asked them to tell us about challenges they are facing that might encourage other young researchers, and here is what we got from David Thomson, a postgraduate student at the University of Glasgow: ‘Work ethic and camaraderie have made the whole experience actually enjoyable and rewarding. From the outset we knew our project was going to require a lot from all of us, and we have remained a cohesive and communicative team. Very early, we recognised each member’s key strengths, and distributed responsibilities accordingly.  We met in Cambridge earlier this March to work, reconnect, and revitalise. We’ve certainly run into our fair share of problems in the development of our application, but I have no doubt that we can tackle whatever issues arise with the same cooperation we have always shown.’

With such dedication, their tremendous progress is certainly headed in all the right directions.