You assign a watch survey exactly as you assign any other survey. The schedule you set is the schedule the watch follows — it keeps its own copy and runs it whether or not the phone is nearby.
Which schedule types reach the watch
| Schedule type | On the watch | |
|---|---|---|
| On Demand | Yes | Listed under Anytime, startable whenever it is within its valid date range |
| Scheduled | Yes | Prompts at each date and time you set |
| Momentary | Yes | Prompts at its scheduled moment, within its window |
| Repeated | Yes | Prompts on each repeat |
| Event and trigger based | No | Location, push and other triggered types stay on the phone |
Windows and timing
A prompted survey opens and closes at the times you set, and the watch respects both ends of that window.
- When a window opens, the watch buzzes and the survey moves to Due Now in the participant’s list.
- In the last stretch before it closes, the list shows how many minutes are left.
- When the window closes, an unfinished survey is ended. The participant sees a brief message, whatever they had already answered is kept and uploaded, and they are returned to the home screen. This mirrors what the phone does, and it protects the momentary meaning of the answers — a response given an hour late no longer describes the moment you asked about.
Watch out
Prompts can arrive up to about five minutes after the window opens. The watch checks for due surveys on a cycle rather than continuously, which is what lets it run all day without draining the battery.
This matters when you design very tight windows. A ten-minute window can lose half its length to that delay. If your protocol depends on prompts landing to the minute, talk to us before you build it.
Reminders
If you set reminders on a schedule, the watch repeats its buzz while the window is still open. It stops as soon as the participant starts or finishes the survey, when the reminder count is used up, or when the window closes — whichever comes first. It never buzzes after a window has closed, and never more than once in a cycle, so a participant cannot be hit with a burst of stacked prompts.
On Demand date ranges
An On Demand survey is offered on the watch only within the valid dates you set for it. Before its start date and after its end date it is simply not in the list.
Getting changes to the watch
The watch only ever receives what the phone already has. When you assign a new survey, change a schedule or edit a survey, the participant’s phone has to fetch that first — by tapping Download Updates in the mEMA app. Once the phone has it, nothing more is needed: the next time the watch connects to the phone app, it syncs on its own and picks up the changes.
So a change you make on the web reaches the wrist in two steps — Download Updates on the phone, then the watch’s next automatic sync — and a survey you assigned this morning will not be on the watch until the participant has done the first of them. If you need a change on a watch quickly, have the participant tap Download Updates with the watch nearby.
Two things worth knowing when you plan
A watch survey is still available on the phone. There is currently no way to mark a survey as watch-only, so a survey that qualifies for the watch appears on both, and a participant could answer it in either place. For most designs this is harmless or useful. If your protocol needs a survey to be answered on the wrist and nowhere else, tell us at the design stage — it is something we can add, and we would like to know that it matters.
Take care when editing a live survey. A watch can be holding answers it has not yet been able to send. If you change that survey in the meantime, those answers still arrive and are still attributed correctly, but the usual advice about editing during data collection applies with a little more force here. Where you can, make changes at a point when watches have recently synced.