For most of us our phone is like our PA - telling us where to go, when and how to get there - and its ability to second-guess us may just have reached a new level: a new study suggests our smartphones can detect whether or not we're depressed.
Carried out by American University, Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine and published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, the study analysed people's behaviour using what they dubbed “Purple Robot,” a sensor data acquisition app that relies on GPS and other usage sensors to gather data. It looked at time spent in certain locations and how long people spend on their phone. And it reports that they were able to predict whether an individual was depressed or not with 86 percent accuracy.
According to the researchers the best part of the findings is that it could act as a conspicuous way to discover whether we're suffering from depression. Dr. David C. Mohr, the leader's study and director of Northwestern’s Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies, told The Daily Beast: “We now have an objective measure of behavior related to depression, and we’re detecting it passively. Phones can provide data unobtrusively and with no effort on the part of the user.”
The study only sampled a small pool of 40 people (found on Craigslist), so there's a lot of headway to make in developing and proving these findings. But the team suggests this could be start of a new innovative way to monitor our mental health. “Regardless of these shortcomings, the ability to passively detect behavioral patterns opens up the possibility of a new generation of behavioral intervention technologies," they write.
But what do you think: seeing as we spend so much time on our phones is the idea of it keeping tabs on your mental health clever or creepy?