The Society of Behavioral Medicine's Annual Meeting draws researchers who study how behavior and physiology interact outside the clinic: a stressful morning, a sleepless night, a flare of pain mid-walk. The SBM and Labfront Behavioral Medicine Research Grant supports research that tracks those moments as they happen, using EMA and continuous wearable data instead of a single clinical snapshot.

We selected five winning projects for the 2026 cycle. Their topics include emotion regulation during pregnancy, sleep and e-cigarette use in chronic pain, physical activity and muscle health in Asian American communities, the physiological aftermath of trauma-related nightmares, and pain and health behaviors in older adults.

Each recipient receives three Garmin vívosmart 5 devices, a one-year Labfront Advanced account, and analytics reports.

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Lizbeth "Libby" Benson, University of Michigan, United States

STARRS (Stress Tracking And Regulation + Reflective Support)

Perinatal mental health problems affect 1 in 5 mothers in the US, and emotion regulation is a key protective factor. Benson, a Research Assistant Professor in the University of Michigan's Data Science for Dynamic Intervention Decision-Making Center (d3center), builds intensive longitudinal methods to model how stress and emotion unfold in daily life, then uses that knowledge to personalize interventions in real time.

STARRS is a just-in-time adaptive intervention (JITAI) for expectant mothers. A training week teaches six evidence-based emotion regulation skills with pregnancy-specific content, followed by four weeks of stress-triggered check-ins using Garmin's stress detection algorithm, paired with personalized feedback visualizations. Early work already shows strong recruitment and compliance. A related proposal for a proof-of-concept and full-scale micro-randomized trial is under review at NIMH; while that decision is pending, this grant lets Benson's team test Garmin's real-time stress detection system directly.

Joon Kyung Nam, Syracuse University, United States

Bidirectional Associations Between Sleep Quality and E-Cigarette Use in Adults with Chronic Low Back Pain

Chronic low back pain (CLBP) is the most common chronic pain condition, and researchers have long linked it to smoking, though they know far less about vaping in this population. Nam, a postdoctoral researcher, has already shown that sleep quality and vaping behavior are bidirectionally related in young adults, using a Garmin-and-Labfront study design he built during his PhD.

Nam's team is extending that work to adults with CLBP over a 7-day protocol. Participants complete five daily EMA prompts on vaping, pain, and sleep while Garmin wearables continuously track objective sleep indicators, sidestepping the recall bias and missing entries that plague self-report-only designs. Combining passive wearable measurement with EMA context lets the team test both directions of the cycle: whether sleep predicts next-day vaping, and whether vaping predicts the next night's sleep.

Aisha Bhimla, Temple University Lewis Katz School of Medicine, United States

Examining Associations Between Aerobic Physical Activity and Strength Training with Muscle Strength and Sarcopenia Outcomes in Asian Americans

Asian American communities face a disproportionate sarcopenia risk, driven by lower baseline skeletal muscle mass, physical inactivity, and a high burden of chronic conditions. Physical activity research on this population is thin, and what exists rarely breaks out ethnic subgroups. Bhimla studies chronic disease disparities through community-based approaches and has previously examined how neighborhood environments shape physical activity in Asian American communities.

Bhimla's team will recruit 40 Asian American adults aged 40 and older to wear a Garmin vívosmart 5 for seven days, capturing objective activity data alongside EMA-reported strength training and measures of muscle strength. The goal is to understand how aerobic activity and strength training relate to pre-sarcopenia and sarcopenia risk, and how that relationship varies across ethnic subgroups often collapsed into a single category in existing data. Findings will support an ancillary R01 study within the MOSAAIC cohort, one of the first cohort studies focused on cardiometabolic risk in Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander populations.

Lisa LaRowe, Massachusetts General Hospital / Harvard Medical School, United States

Characterizing Dynamic Relationships Between Chronic Pain and Health Behaviors in Older Adults Using Ecological Momentary Assessment and Wearable Sensors

Chronic pain affects 38% of adults 65 and older, and it's closely tied to physical activity, sleep, and substance use. This body of research has largely overlooked older adults, even though studies in the general population show the relationship runs both ways: healthy behavior can ease pain, and pain can undercut healthy behavior. LaRowe, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard and a researcher in MGH's Center for Optimal Aging and Serious Illness Research, previously used EMA and wearable data through an NIA-funded postdoctoral fellowship to study pain and activity in middle-aged adults. Her team's national study found that greater pain severity tracked with less activity, worse sleep, and higher nicotine and alcohol use, but that cross-sectional data couldn't show which way the relationship runs.

This feasibility study runs a two-week EMA pilot with 12 older adults with chronic pain, pairing EMA-reported pain and substance use with Garmin-tracked physical activity and sleep, to test whether Labfront can capture that relationship in an older population at all. If it holds up, it becomes the basis for a fully powered NIH study on the reciprocal, time-varying relationship between pain and health behaviors in this age group.

Nancy Hamilton, University of Kansas, United States

STAND-UP (Student Trauma and Nightmare Development – Understanding Physiology)

Nightmares are common after trauma, particularly sexual violence trauma (SVT), which affects roughly one in four women, most before age 25. Prior research ties nightmares to markers of autonomic arousal, including elevated heart rate and reduced heart rate variability, but whether that arousal carries into the next day has been an open question. Hamilton's team is testing it directly.

Using Garmin and Labfront, the study continuously monitors heart rate and HRV in 20 college-aged women with SVT histories over seven days, comparing nightmare nights against non-nightmare nights. If the arousal signature persists past the night itself, it points to nightmares as an underrecognized early risk factor for cardiovascular disease, and a chance to intervene decades before CVD takes hold.

What comes next

We look forward to seeing what these five awardees uncover. Applications for future grant cycles open at labfront.com/grant.