Psychological and psychophysiological ambulatory monitoring - A review of hardware and software solutions

Ambulatory assessment targets capturing psychological, behavioral, and physiological data in "real time" using in-field data acquisition systems. Although ambulatory assessment research has flourished particularly in the last decades, overviews on hardware and software solutions for monitoring are scarce, and - if found - are often outdated. In this review, we give an overview of current software and hardware solutions, focusing on multichannel systems for physiological data acquisition and hand-held computer based "experience sampling" systems. We aim at offering the reader guidance with regard to their choice of psychological and physiological monitoring solutions, giving special emphasis to key features relevant for different research questions.