The Human Experience and Ambulatory Technologies (HEAT) Lab at Emory University School of Medicine is directed by Deanna Kaplan, PhD and is a collaboration between the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine and Emory Spiritual Health. We are an interdisciplinary team of scientists, scholars, and trainees who are passionate about using ambulatory assessment technologies to advance integrative medicine research and practice. Our research is grounded in a biopsychosocial-spiritual model of health. The types of questions that motivate our work include: How can data from daily life be used to individually tailor treatments to patients’ individual preferences and needs? How can speech-based assessment technologies facilitate more personalized care and infuse clinical research with insights from patients’ own narrative stories? On the other hand, what risks of negative outcomes do these technologies confer? How do we enter the era of the “quantified self” and AI-assisted data analysis without compromising the qualities and values that make us human?
One of our lab’s flagship projects is Fabla, an EMA smartphone app that allows research participants to securely send voice memos to researchers. Reflecting our commitment to open science, Fabla is an open-source and unlicensed software platform hosted and maintained at Emory University for use by research teams and clinics everywhere. Fabla is IRB-approved and currently in use in numerous U.S.-based studies (including NIH-funded and VA-funded work), as well as in Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.
Our lab also designs and executes ambulatory assessment studies for collaborators pursuing integrative health research at Emory and beyond. Choosing from a variety of observational, self-reported and physiological methods, we develop and administer multi-method designs tailored to the research aims as well as the unique needs of participants in the study population. If you are an investigator interested in ambulatory assessment design collaboration (including the EAR method) or are a student/trainee seeking methods consultation, please click here.
About Dr. Kaplan
Deanna Kaplan, PhD (she/hers) is a licensed clinical psychologist and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at Emory University School of Medicine. Dr. Kaplan has more than a decade of experience using wearable and smartphone-based technologies to study the real-world dynamics of health processes and clinical change during peoples’ daily lives. This research is grounded in a biopsychosocial-spiritual model of health, and she serves as Director of Health Technologies for Emory Healthcare’s Spiritual Health division. She holds an adjunct appointment in Emory’s Department of Psychology and is appointed faculty for several Emory centers, including the Winship Cancer Institute, the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality (ECPS), and the Advancement of Diagnostics for a Just Society (ADJUST) Center. She also holds an appointment as an adjunct Assistant Professor at Brown University in affiliation with the Center for Digital Health. Dr. Kaplan received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Arizona, completed her predoctoral clinical internship at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University, and completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at Brown University, where she received an F32 National Research Service Award (NRSA) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Her research has been funded by the NIH, the Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance, the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, and the Vail Health Foundation, among others. She was named as a 2025 Rising Star by Genomics Press for her work in mental health assessment technology innovation.