The Journal of mHealth Vol 2 Issue 4 (August) | Page 21

Industry News

Your Smartphone Knows If You’re
Depressed
Time spent on smartphone and GPS location
sensor data detect depression
You can fake a smile, but your phone
knows the truth. Depression can be
detected from your smartphone sensor
data by tracking the number of minutes you use the phone and your daily
geographical locations, reports a small
Northwestern Medicine study.
The more time you spend using your
phone, the more likely you are depressed.
The average daily usage for depressed
individuals was about 68 minutes, while
for non-depressed individuals it was
about 17 minutes.
Spending most of your time at home and
most of your time in fewer locations -as measured by GPS tracking – are also
linked to depression, as is, having a less
regular day-to-day schedule.
Based on the phone sensor data, Northwestern scientists could identify people
with depressive symptoms with 87 per
cent accuracy.
“The significance of this is we can detect
if a person has depressive symptoms and
the severity of those symptoms without
asking them any questions,” said senior
author David Mohr, director of the Centre for Behavioural Intervention Technologies at Northwestern University
Feinberg School of Medicine. “We now
have an objective measure of behaviour
related to depression. And we’re detecting it passively. Phones can provide data
unobtrusively and with no effort on the
part of the user.”
The research could ultimately lead to
monitoring people at risk of depression
and enabling health care providers to
intervene more quickly.
The smart phone data was proven to
be more reliable in detecting depression
than having participants answer daily
questions about how sad they were feeling on a scale of 1 to 10. “Their answers
may be ro H[