ARE YOU BONKERS OR NOT?: Dartmouth researchers have become the first to create an app that detects mental health status.
The first smartphone app that automatically provides indicators of mental health status has been created by researchers at Dartmouth University in the US state of New Hampshire. The first version is oriented towards students, but they say it's applicable to all populations with an eye to reducing stress and increasing productivity and quality of life.
The app, a work in progress, is being called The StudentLife app and it tracks mental health status by means of smartphone sensors.
"The StudentLife app is able to continuously make mental health assessment 24/7, opening the way for a new form of assessment," says computer science Professor Andrew Campbell, the study's senior author. "This is a very important and exciting breakthrough."
For the first test-run, a test group of 48 Dartmouth students downloaded an Android prototype of the app that monitored readings from their smartphones' sensors (such as accelerometer, microphone, light sensor and GPS) for 10 weeks. Using their academic performance as a baseline, the readings were used to interpret students' mental health based on factors such as stress, time spent socialising and physical activity levels.
Data from the sensors was assessed using algorithms and the app was able to measure a considerable number of behaviors automatically without input from the students including conversations in number and duration, sleep duration, walking, sitting, running, standing and the location of students on campus, discerning automatically between the gym, the cafeteria, parties and class.
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