CARWatch is an open-source framework to support objective and low-cost assessment of cortisol samples in real-world, unsupervised environments. It is especially suitable for cortisol awakening response (CAR) research, but not limited to this application.
It consists of an Android application that schedules sampling times and tracks them by scanning a barcode on the respective sampling tube as well as a web app that provides tools to configure studies and prepare the study materials and to process the log data recorded by the app. Alternatively, users with programming experience can use the corresponding Python package that provides the same range of functionality.
Get the Android app on the Play Store:
Visit the CARWatch Website
To use CARWatch, you need to prepare the study materials and configure the app. The whole workflow is illustrated in the following figure:
CARWatch is designed to be used in CAR studies.
This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.
If you use the carwatch framework in your work, please report the version you used in the text. Additionally, please also cite our paper published in Psychoneuroendocrinology:
Richer, R., Abel, L., Küderle, A., Eskofier, B. M., & Rohleder, N. (2023). CARWatch – A smartphone application for
improving the accuracy of cortisol awakening response sampling. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 151, 106073.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2023.106073
The following papers used CARWatch in their research:
- Richer, R., Abel, L., Küderle, A., Eskofier, B. M., & Rohleder, N. (2023). CARWatch – A smartphone application for improving the accuracy of cortisol awakening response sampling. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 151, 106073. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2023.106073
- Richer, R., Küderle, A., Dörr, J., Rohleder, N., & Eskofier, B. M. (2021). Assessing the Influence of the Inner Clock on the Cortisol Awakening Response and Pre-Awakening Movement. 2021 IEEE EMBS International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI), 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1109/BHI50953.2021.9508529
- further papers to be added - let us know if you used CARWatch in your research!
We welcome contributions to CARWatch! To contribute, please fork this repository and submit a pull request with your changes.
If you have any questions or feedback about CARWatch, please contact Robert Richer.