Our smartphones may know when we are sad
Smartphones and computers we all constantly carry around with us arenât just supplying us with useful information, theyâre also collecting a great deal of data about us and our habits. All of this data is logged, stored and used by apps and companies to âimprove the user experienceâ. For instance, Apple or Samsung can pass voice searches on to a third party for speech-to-text conversions, and might share all this data with business partners who in turn can use it to advertise us. For this reason it is important to know what kind of data we are giving up every time we switch our smartphones on.
Each type of data can reveal something about our interests and preferences, views, hobbies and social interactions. New and sophisticated methods built into smartphones make it also easy to track and monitor our behaviour. Posts on social media such as a quick tweets, a rambling or a ranting Facebook status, can give a clear indication about the phone owners' mood. But background data tracked by the smartphone itself can predict our temperament too.
An Italian study conducted by Venet Osmani at the Centre for Research and Telecommunication Experimentation for Networked Communities (CREATE-NET) used a combination of phone sensors to understand when someone was feeling depressed and it discovered that the activity and location data stored by the smartphones could accurately predict patients' mood changes at the rate of 94 per cent.
Another study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, investigated whether a personâs movements and activities as recorded by their smartphone signalled behavioural changes associated with depression. The results showed that these aspects are closely correlated. It has been discovered that people with depression spend more time in fewer places. Moreover, depressed individuals tend to have irregular movement patterns and to use their mobile phones for long periods of time, not for making phone calls, but for texting, playing games or reading.
These studies are an interesting piece of evidence on how mobile phones could detect symptoms of depression. Can mobile phones be used in future to help clinicians understand how depressive symptoms and depression change over time or to develop better treatments and strategies to help people with depression?













