SERENA - Self-Reporting and Experience Sampling Asssistant

What is SERENA?

SERENA stands for SElf-REporting and ExperieNce sampling Assistant. It is a tool for self-reporting through questionnaires and automated data logging in a singular smartphone application.

SERENA helps to collect self-reported data in long-term user studies with the smartphone. Participants enter self-reported information in questionnaires that are displayed on the phone. In addition, application usage can be monitored automatically. Logs can be used to obtain ground truth, or you can log quantitative data and additionally ask for subjective feedback through questionnaires. All collected (log and questionnaire) information is stored on the phone and automatically transferred to the backend server. The server also enables easy analysis and export of the data.

Screenshot of a questionnaire displayed with the SERENA app.	The backend allows simple generation of questionnaires with different question types to cover a variety of evaluation scenarios.	Questionnaire triggers and multiple surveys in different groups can easily be administrated using the web interface.

How easy is it to set up SERENA for a study?

Setting up SERENA for a study requires only a few simple steps. Questionnaires and study conditions (such as durations, survey intervals and triggers, logged information) are comfortably entered in the web interface, the generated XML file is used to build an individual Android application, which can be distributed among the participants.

Answered questionnaires and logged usage information is automatically uploaded to the server, so that it does not have to be collected from the participants' devices. Its flexibility makes SERENA suitable for a broad range of studies. It can capture application usage, trigger questionnaires for self-reporting interval-based or event-based (e.g. after a certain application has been used). Participants can also manually fill out questionnaires in a diary style.

By group IDs, separate sets of questionnaires can be used for different groups, if you want to run multiple studies in parallel or have a between-subjects design. Questionnaires can even be sent to devices after the study has started.

Who has developed SERENA?

SERENA is a development of the Multimodal Information Processing Group at Technische Universität München (TUM). SERENA has been presented at CHI 2013. See the CHI Paper describing a study conducted with SERENA.

Can I use SERENA for my research?

Yes! You are encouraged to use SERENA for your own studies and we hope it can prove useful for your scenario. SERENA is available under the GNU General Public License 3.0.

You can download a ZIP package with all required software here:

If you download and use the software or any of its components, please cite SERENA using the following citation:

A. Möller, M. Kranz, B. Schmid, L. Roalter, S. Diewald
Investigating Self-Reporting Behavior In Long-Term Studies
In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2013), pp. 2931-2940, ACM, New York, USA, April-May 2013.

Or use the BibTex entry.

Where can I find more information?

Visit our group's web page at www.eislab.net.