A platform for academics by academics

Helping you to uncover insights and make the world a better place

Going digital with PSYT

Digital products are enlightening today’s research. They can help us collect large amounts of accurate, ecologically-valid data in real-time.

Their scalability increases the statistical power of our studies, helping us uncover reliable relationships and create greater social impact.

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We created Mappiness, the world’s largest academic study into momentary happiness. Now we want to help others conduct similar wide scale studies to reveal insights previously undiscoverable by traditional methods.

Some of our projects

To date we have handled more than 4m responses from 100,000+ users

Mappiness
Mappiness measured how people’s emotions are affected by their environment – air pollution, noise, weather, green spaces, blue spaces and so on. Users learnt how their happiness was affected by the time of day, by who they were with and what they were doing. Among many other things we discovered people are happiest in blue and green spaces, like estuaries, then green spaces and lastly urban spaces. We discovered the impact of work on happiness, the impact of terrorism and the impact of supporting a football team! “Mappiness is fantastic” Dorothy Miell, President of the British Psychological Society.
EmoTrak
EmoTrak is an app developed in partnership with Eve Ekman from UCSF that asks daily questions about your experience of emotion. This form of ecological momentary assessment (EMA) has been found to be successful at promoting awareness and behaviour change. It helps develop mindfulness of emotions and self reflection so users can more skilfully navigate their individual and interpersonal interactions.
Moo-Q
Moo-Q investigated the relationship between mood and brainpower. The app recorded your positive and negative affect, your memory ability and processing speed. Users learnt more about when their mind works most effectively.
Qwantify
Qwantify is a research project that investigated the relationship between desire and happiness. Users learnt how desires affected their mood, stress, and well-being, while providing invaluable data to researchers. Understanding the impact of our desires can help us manage them and improve our wellbeing
WeSense
WeSense helped create cities that are more attractive, healthier, equitable and safer. Run in Amsterdam, the goal was to learn more about people’s perception of urban environments and what affects these surroundings have on them.
Vice Media
With Vice media we created a documentary tracking the emotional wellbeing of Pete, a millennial from New York. He gained insights into his mental health and the factors most affecting it and we fed it back to him in person. Find out what he learned here.

Measure

We create apps that employ the latest in research methods.

  • Ecological momentary assessment (EMA)
  • Experience sampling method (ESM)
  • Day reconstruction method (DRM)

As well as being able to employ more traditional methods.

You can also incorporate physiological, cognitive and geographical data to give you the richest possible data set.

Integrate interventions

Build your interventions into the app and assess their efficacy. We use the best in persuasive technology and user-design to maximise the engagement with your interventions and their resulting impact. Integrate audio, video, reflective practices, heart rate variability and other interactive practices to maximise engagement and learning.

Visualise data

We can provide internally and externally facing dashboards that enhance social engagement and sign-up, that let you visualise your data, participation rates, and relationships between variables.

Explore features

Using apps to conduct your research provides many advantages:

Avoid cognitive biases

Avoid cognitive biases and heuristics that plague retrospective self-report surveys.

Greater controls

Ask more questions and control for a greater range of confounding variables while avoiding study fatigue.

Ecologically valid

Gain ecological validity by surveying people as they go about their normal routines.

Richer insights

Uncover rich within-person variation that is undetectable by traditional methods.

Greater social impact

Scale your research and interventions to 10,000s of people for greater social impact.

Native experience

Your apps will be coded natively for android and iPhone, providing the best user experience, enhancing compliance and reducing attrition.

Maximise engagement

Provide users with feedback and gamification to maximise engagement and data.

Run RCT’s

Undertake wide scale randomised controlled trials with relative ease in comparison to traditional methods.

Data sources

Integrate data from a range of sources including physiological data, cognitive data, heart rate variability, GPS, ambulatory assessment etc.

Featured in these leading publications

Why PSYT?

Receive expert consultancy from the researchers behind the world’s largest ESM study

Experience & expertise

We can work with you on question design, randomisation and weighting, dynamic flows, branching and skipping and appropriate wording and presentation.

Beautiful design & UX

Our in-house designers can create you a beautiful app that is a joy for participants to use and maximises engagement.

Secure

Enterprise grade security. PSYT is ISO27001:2013 certified for information security management. Response data is encrypted to industry standards both in transit and at rest.

“I came to PSYT because of their experience in applying cutting-edge technology to psychological data collection. Experience Sampling has many advantages over typical methods. They asked all the right questions, and delivered an app that was better than we could have hoped for, quickly and within budget. The app attracted a huge amount of media attention and we had tens of thousands of research subjects in just a few weeks. Now we’re getting to work with a wealth of high-quality experience sampling data that provides remarkable insights far beyond that which could be obtained from typical survey techniques. I can highly recommend working with PSYT.”
Sophie von Stumm
Associate Professor of Psychology, London School of Economics
PSYT worked closely with us to realize our ideal mobile research tool. Their expertise in psychology, measurement and mobile apps made them our perfect technology partners. They’ve been incredibly responsive to all of our needs throughout the app development process, and have gone above and beyond in terms of service. In terms of the product, users love how the app feeds back analysis of their own response data, and we love how easy it is to access, analyze and gain insights from the data as it comes in. They are truly wonderful to work with!
Wendy Hasenkamp
Scientific Director, Mind and Life Institute Mind & Life Institute