App Pausing on iPhone/ Defaulting to Previous Study

Hi,

A majority of my participants are having issues with the Ethica App pausing about every hour, despite the app still being on in the background. They are iPhone users. Is there anyway to fix this?

Additionally, my organization has used Ethica for the past three years as a recurring study. For students who have participated in the previous year’s study and already have an Ethica account, the landing page for Ethica is the previous year’s study. I’m still able to collect the current year’s data, but the default page is for last year. How can I resolve this issue?

Best,
Anisha

Hey @anishaa,

I’ll answer your first question, but for your second question, can you remove it from here and create a new post for it? You can remove it by editing the post. As we listed in the Welcome page, it’s a lot better to keep each post dedicated to only one question.

Regarding your question, in your study you are collecting all motion sensor data: Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Gravity, Linear Acceleration, Magnetic Field, Orientation, Pedometer, and Activity Recognition. That generates nearly 7000 records per minute per participant while many other studies usually generate 100 or so. Also, almost always having all 8 of these sensors are unnecessary unless your research question is “How smartphone sensors fuse hardware readings”!

This large amount of data causes the app to stop very frequently in iOS, and in Android too, and that’s why participants get these messages. Note that studies usually collect 100 or so sensor readings per minute (e.g. if you only collect Pedometer and Activity Recognition data), and 7000 is considerably higher.

The only solution here is to remove the sensor you do not intend to use. We had a session on this in our workshop this Tuesday which we discussed this issue in detail. The videos of the workshop will be out soon and you can check them out for more details.

Hope it helps.

A post was split to a new topic: Surveys not triggered on iPhone