Smartphone sensors may detect depression, study says

[IceWizard]

Data from your smartphone sensors tracking phone usage and geographical locations may be able to detect depression, revealed a study published Wednesday in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.

Study participants who were depressed used their phones for an average of 68 minutes a day, compared to 17 minutes for non-depressed individuals.
Spending more time at home and in fewer locations was also linked to depression.

According to phone sensor data, researchers identified individuals with depressive symptoms with 87 percent accuracy.

Researchers used GPS tracking and phone data to study a group of 28 individuals with an average age of 29 over two weeks.

At the beginning of the study, the 20 female
and eight male participants took a widely
used standardized questionnaire measuring depression, the PHQ-9.

Within the group, 14 participants did not have any signs of depression, and the remaining half had symptoms ranging from mild to severe depression.

Typically, smartphone applications for mental health treatment are essentially feedback tools, requiring users to enter information, said senior author David Mohr, director of the Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

The team proposed using a phone’s existing sensors to detect symptoms to potentially lead to timelier, more effective care.

“People get tired very quickly of entering
information in [apps],” Mohr told FoxNews.com. “There are so many sensors
available in smartphones; harnessing them
could passively detect the state we’re
interested in.”

The team used 12 variables like GPS and
phone usage data, and correlated algorithms with the participants’ PHQ-9 test results. They found that a number of them significantly corresponded with depression.

“One of the most significant variables was
actually how subjects spent time in different
locations they were visiting— spending most of their time in still locations or spreading time across different locations,” lead author Sohrob Saeb, a postdoctoral fellow and computer scientist in preventive medicine at Feinberg told FoxNews.com.

“It was very much related to depression; people with higher depressive symptoms
seemed to spend most of the time in very
few locations.”

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