Can Your Mobile Phone Tell if You’re Depressed?

6 Aug 2015

Although faking a smile might be easy, you can’t fool your mobile phone.

Just when you think our phones know just about everything about us, they can now even detect when we are feeling sad, according to a new study from Northwestern University in Illinois.

To get a diagnosis of depression, you normally have to fill out a questionnaire giving details about your mood as well, as undergo long interviews with a psychiatrist. Now, however, some of this work can be handled through smartphone apps — or at least give you an indication if you are at risk of becoming depressed. This is done through collecting data as well as GPS tracking information, according to this study.

Researchers developed and tested an app called Purple Robot. It uses multiple sensors in the mobile phone to gather data about location, phone usage, movement and other activities to assess if the mobile phone user is indeed depressed.

According to Sohrob Saeb, Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine’s postdoctoral researcher and one of the Purple Robot developers, the main purpose of developing the app was to see if they could passively and objectively identify if people had depression.

Twenty eight people between the ages of 19 and 58 were recruited off Craigslist by Northwestern researchers. They were asked to add location-and-usage monitoring software on their smartphones.

Part of their involvement in the study was to answer a standardized questionnaire that is designed to measure depressive symptoms. It found that half of the participants had depression symptoms and half did not. During a two week period, the smartphones tracked GPS data every five minutes and pinged the participants with questions several times a day about their mood.

The data the researchers collected from the phones was extensive: it included the amount of locations the subjects visited each day, how long they stayed in these locations, and how many times they used their mobile phones. This objective data was then correlated by the researchers to get their depression test scores.

The researchers were able to identity people who showed depressive symptoms with 87 percent accuracy, based on the sensor data from the phones.

The study found that the longer people use their phones, the more chance they have of becoming depressed. It was also found that staying at home a lot was also linked to depression.

Although the data collected from the phones couldn’t identify how the phones were being used by the participants, it was suspected that people used them more for playing games and surfing the web instead of talking with their friends.

Saeb said they will see if they are able to reduce depression symptoms by encouraging people to establish a more regular routine, visit more locations each day and reduce the amount of time they use their phones.

The study was published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.


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