Smartphones have become an integral part of many people’s lives and owing to this, researchers have revealed that these gadgets and their usage pattern could reveal if a person is depressed.
Researchers at Northwestern University have revealed that using smartphone’s sensor data to gauge its usage, it can be ascertained with 87 per cent accuracy if the owner of that smartphone is suffering from depression or not.
The small Northwestern Medicine study says that 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.
Further, location data base don GPS tracking could also provide important clues about a person’s depression. Also, having a less regular day-to-day schedule, leaving your house and going to work at different times each day, for example, also is linked to depression.
Researchers reveal that the significance of their findings is that all the sensor data can be collected without a user knowing about it and symptoms of depression can be checked for passively with no effort on the part of the user. They claims that their research could ultimately lead to monitoring people at risk of depression and enabling health care providers to intervene more quickly.
The smartphone data was more reliable in detecting depression than daily questions participants answered about how sad they were feeling on a scale of 1 to 10. Their answers may be rote and often are not reliable, said lead author Sohrob Saeb, a postdoctoral fellow and computer scientist in preventive medicine at Feinberg.
“The data showing depressed people tended not to go many places reflects the loss of motivation seen in depression,” said senior author David Mohr, director of the Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, who is a clinical psychologist and professor of preventive medicine at Feinberg. “When people are depressed, they tend to withdraw and don’t have the motivation or energy to go out and do things.”
“People are likely, when on their phones, to avoid thinking about things that are troubling, painful feelings or difficult relationships,” Mohr said. “It’s an avoidance behavior we see in depression.”
Saeb analyzed the GPS locations and phone usage for 28 individuals (20 females and eight males, average age of 29) over two weeks. The sensor tracked GPS locations every five minutes.
To determine the relationship between phone usage and geographical location and depression, the subjects took a widely used standardized questionnaire measuring depression, the PHQ-9, at the beginning of the two-week study. The PHQ-9 asks about symptoms used to diagnose depression such as sadness, loss of pleasure, hopelessness, disturbances in sleep and appetite, and difficulty concentrating. Then, Saeb developed algorithms using the GPS and phone usage data collected from the phone, and correlated the results of those GPS and phone usage algorithms with the subjects’ depression test results.
Of the participants, 14 did not have any signs of depression and 14 had symptoms ranging from mild to severe depression.
The goal of the research is to passively detect depression and different levels of emotional states related to depression, Saeb said.
The information ultimately could be used to monitor people who are at risk of depression to, perhaps, offer them interventions if the sensor detected depression or to deliver the information to their clinicians.
Future Northwestern research will look at whether getting people to change those behaviors linked to depression improves their mood.
“We will see if we can reduce symptoms of depression by encouraging people to visit more locations throughout the day, have a more regular routine, spend more time in a variety of places or reduce mobile phone use,” Saeb said.
The findings of the study have been published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.
