The mEMA watch app puts surveys on a participant’s Garmin watch. The assessment happens on the wrist — a quiet buzz, a glance, a few taps, and it is done, with nothing taken out of a pocket.
You build the survey in the survey editor you already use, assign it on the Survey Assignment window you already use, and the responses arrive in your reports alongside every phone response. Nothing about your workflow changes. What changes is where the participant answers.
The watch works on its own. Once a survey has reached the watch, the participant can be prompted, answer and finish while their phone sits in another room, out of battery, or left at home for the day. Their answers wait on the watch and upload by themselves the next time the two are together.
Pilot feature
The watch app is built and tested, but it has not yet run in a live study. We are looking for a small number of research teams to use it and tell us how it goes.
Talk to us before you scope a study around it. We will help you judge whether it fits your protocol, and we would like to hear what works and what gets in the way.
Two Garmin features, one watch
mEMA does two separate things with a Garmin watch, and it is worth being clear about which one you are turning on.
- Biometric data collection gathers heart rate, stress, sleep and similar measures passively in the background. This is what the existing Garmin articles in this knowledge base describe.
- The watch app — this guide — delivers surveys to the watch for the participant to answer.
They are independent. Each has its own setting in your study configuration, and turning on one does not turn on the other. A study can use either, both, or neither.
What we think it is good for
Our expectation is that the watch is strongest for brief, frequent prompts — the micro-EMA end of the spectrum, where a handful of short questions many times a day is more valuable than a long assessment a few times a day. Pulling out a phone is real friction at that frequency; a buzz on the wrist and three taps is not.
It should also help wherever the phone is unreliably to hand: exercise, work with a uniform or locker policy, sleep and wake protocols, or any population that carries a phone inconsistently.
That is a hypothesis, not a finding. Tell us what you observe.
What is the same, and what is different
| Unchanged | Different on the watch |
|---|---|
| You build surveys in the same editor | The watch displays the Short Text, not the Long Text |
| You assign and schedule them the same way | The participant answers one question per screen, moving forward only |
| Responses appear in your usual reports and exports | Prompts arrive as a buzz on the wrist, with no survey name shown |
| Participants set up the phone app the way they always have | There is nothing to enter on the watch |
Supported watches
Garmin Venu 3, Venu Sq 2, Vivoactive 4 and Vivoactive 5. The participant’s phone can be Android or iPhone.
If your study needs a model that is not on this list, ask us — adding a model is usually straightforward, but it has to be built and tested before you can rely on it.
Where this is heading
This first phase covers surveys. The direction we see beyond it is joining the two Garmin features together: using what the watch already senses to decide when to ask, so prompts arrive at moments that matter rather than on a fixed clock. That is not built, and feedback from this pilot will shape it.