Anonymous chat messages - KL-Psychological-Methodology/ESMira GitHub Wiki

ESMira incorporates a chat message system with which participants can communicate with the study administrators anonymously. Additionally, study administrators can send group messages to either all participants or only to a subsection of participants selected through various filters (e.g., phone type or app version)

Note 1: To avoid dependency on third party services, ESMira does not use push notifications (which require a single fixed server registered to Google or Apple services). Instead, the app automatically checks for new messages approximately every 12 hours and every time when the app is started. This means that messages to participants are not transmitted in real time.

Note 2: Be aware that messages only work through the app. Participants that use the web version can not receive or send study messages

Sending messages

You can either send a message to one specific participant or to multiple (or all) participants.

If you want to send a message to multiple participants, select "Send a message to participant(s)" and then "To all". You can then choose if the message should only be sent to participants who use a specific app version, or a specific app type of the ESMira app. If you do not want to limit the message to a specific app version or app type, you can leave the appropriate input box empty.

Note: A message that has just been sent, will be marked as "waiting". This means that the message was not received by the participant. As long as the message is in "waiting" state, it can still be deleted.

Receiving messages

When there are unread messages that have been sent by participants, the icon of the messages button in the admin panel will be colored in red. Messages from a participant will be marked as read after you pressed the button "Mark messages as read" or after you have sent a message to that participant.