Smartphone Usage is Linked to Your Level of Depression
by April McCarthy, Prevent Disease, Waking Times
You can fake a smile, but your phone knows the truth. Depression can be detected from your smartphone sensor data by tracking the number of minutes you use the phone and your daily geographical locations, reports a Northwestern Medicine study.
More and more smartphones are able to see what many of us cannot.
The ongoing use of this communications technology, as compared to computer-based use such as email, is linked to increased psychological distress and reduced family satisfaction.
Spending more time on a mobile phone has been confirmed to increase your risk of getting brain cancer by as much as 40 percent, but it’s also linked with something else–depression.
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.
Spending most of your time at home and most of your time in fewer locations — as measured by GPS tracking — also are linked to depression. And, 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.
Based on the phone sensor data, Northwestern scientists could identify people with depressive symptoms with 87 percent accuracy.
“The significance of this is we can detect if a person has depressive symptoms and the severity of those symptoms without asking them any questions,” said senior author David Mohr, director of the Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “We now have an objective measure…
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