Study Tests Activity Tracking App to Detect Depression

Some of the most popular apps in the app store are the health and fitness ones. Using technology to track your daily steps and convert your physical activity into mileage and calories burned can be a good way to monitor your overall physical fitness and health.

But what if changes in activity level could flag overlooked symptoms of depression? Now, researchers at Dartmouth College hope that tracking daily physical activities can be good for your mental health, as well as your fitness.

Conducted by Dartmouth College’s Dartmouth Networking and Ubiquitous Systems Laboratory, the StudentLife Study is the first to use a smartphone and app to monitor and assess students’ mental health―happiness, stress, depression, and loneliness―along with their academic performance.

Over a ten-week spring term, forty-eight Dartmouth undergrad and grad students had an Android app that monitored readings from their smartphone 24/7 to measure activities such as sleep, sociability, physical activity, eating habits, and more. According to a Dartmouth Now article, the study found:

Students who sleep more or have more conversations are less likely to be depressed; students who are more physically active are less likely to feel lonely; students who are around other students are less likely to be depressed. Also, surprisingly, there was no correlation between students’ academic performance and their class attendance; students who are more social (i.e., had more conversations) have a better GPA; students who have higher GPAs tend to be less physically active, have lower indoor mobility at night, and spend more time around others.

While finding out that there was no correlation between grades and how often students came to class raised eyebrows, other findings―decline in physical activity and face-to-face conversations could indicate stress and depression―corresponded to expectations.

But is this technology potentially too intrusive? What about HIPPA guidelines? While there are many unanswered questions, Dartmouth Professor of Computer Science Andrew Campbell, the study’s senior author, said, “The StudentLife app is able to continuously make mental health assessment 24/7, opening the way for a new form of assessment. This is a very important and exciting breakthrough.”

For more information, Dartmouth College’s DartNets Lab has publicly released the StudentLife dataset. The Dartmouth work was inspired by the MIT Media Lab’s earlier research on the concept that data from personal devices can potentially offer valuable insight into human behavior (see “TR10: Social Physics”).

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