Digital phenotyping is Tom Insel’s fancy term for using some of the vast amount of data that our cell phones collect about our behavior to try to inform assessments of mental health diagnosis, symptoms and risk. Two years ago an article in JAMA Internal Medicine highlighted significant deficiencies in the way that smartphone-based conversational agents like Siri or Cortona responded to …
Mood Trends
Mood trends are useful to track in order to prevent a full blown episode of depression, hypomania or mania. I think of them as equivalent to the idea of a falling or rising barometer. Before satellites and modern weather forecasting, whether the barometer was rising or falling was the best predictor of the weather. If the barometer was rising it …
Smartphone Mood Tracking Startup
One of the most powerful ways of improving the outcomes of psychiatric treatment for depression is mood tracking, but for many reasons keeping detailed and daily records of mood changes is difficult and relatively few people in treatment use this technique. We’ve written before about significant evidence that suggests that smartphones can provide data automatically that can be used to …