Your phone knows a ton of information about you. It knows about your online shoe shopping addiction and how much you play Candy Crush. It can also track your sleep habits, read your pulse, motivate you to work out and keep track of your period. And soon it might be able to monitor your mental health too.
A small study from Northwestern University found that how and where we use our phones can be a sign of depression. Researchers looked at how often participants used their phones each day and found that depressed people reach for theirs twice as much as people who aren’t depressed. It might sound backwards since depressed people usually shut themselves off from the rest of the world. And researchers couldn’t tell exactly what people were using their phones to do, but they think that the depressed study participants were using their phones to play games and surf the web, not to reach out to friends and family.
“People are likely, when on their phones, to avoid thinking about things that are troubling, painful feelings, or difficult relationships,” said senior author David Mohr. “It’s an avoidance behavior we see in depression.”
The researchers also learned that when the phone data was compared to the results of a traditional depression screening questionnaire you fill out yourself, the phone did a better job of predicting whether or not someone was depressed. It identified the mental illness with 86-percent accuracy!
So researchers think this could be a huge help to doctors and people who suffer from depression, which is the most common mental illness. It could help doctors more easily identify when someone is becoming depressed and help with the treatment plan.
