Could your digital habits indicate a mental disorder?

Scientists are searching for a more effective and less invasive way to diagnose mental disorders and have turned to the data provided by smartphones about our digital habits to develop it.Find out how.

With information about our digital habits, you could detect mental disorders

Tom Insel, a research psychiatrist who led the National Institute of Mental Health and worked in a new Google mental health care unit called Verily, he is developing a way to diagnose mental disorders using the abundant accumulated information of people's digital habits.

Insel's job at Verily was to discover how to use the technology to create faster, cheaper and better ways to help people with mental illnesses .

In Verily, Insel investigated how to use the behavioral data User’s opinion that the smartphone can collect, to create systems that could detect and respond to mental anguish sooner and with more delicacy.

At least a dozen other technology and health companies and many academic researchers are also exploring how they could use digital data-based technology to improve mental health care.

However, Insel wanted a more agile platform, so I leave Google to join a much smaller company, a startup called Mindstrong, to develop mental health assessment models based on how people use their smart phone keyboards.

Could your digital habits indicate a mental disorder?

That approach is quite typical of companies that create the new connected mental health care sector.to focus not on checklists, on conventional diagnoses and on face-to-face therapy visits, but on the construction of more flexible and comprehensive evaluation and intervention models, based on data of smartphones and social connections that are now digitized.

The first step in these models is to collect (with the consent of users) the wealth of data generated by smartphones that can reflect the mental health : how you move, talk, write or sleep; if you answer calls and text messages, in chats…; if you are going out and how often you do it so much...These data can quickly show changes in behavior, which can indicate changes in mood.

The idea is to use that data to detect and solving problems at an earlier stage , so addressing them can be easier, avoiding consequences for those who suffer them.For example, when psychosis is not diagnosed in time, the person can isolate himself, end up without work and without home.

If you can detect the first signs in changes such as isolation of the person (as evidenced in the chats, calls or email), the therapeutic responses may be faster , less formalized and disruptive, and more patient oriented.

What do you think of this idea?

Images: JESHOOTS

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