Your phone might very well know when you’re depressed, as a new study has found that phone data could predict whether someone had depressive symptoms with an accuracy level of 87 percent.
According to the small new study, which was published in the journal Medical Internet Research, spending a lot of time at home has been linked to depression and correlated phone data could be used to accurately predict depression.
Those behind the study, researchers at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, recruited a total of 28 people from Craigslist, ages 19 to 58. The study’s participants had their smartphones hooked up with location-and-usage monitoring software.
At the onset of the study, the researchers issued a standardized questionnaire to participants in order to measure depressive symptoms. Half of the study’s subjects were shown to have symptoms of depression while the other half showed no symptoms of depression. The standardized questionnaire employed by the researchers to measure depression was the widely used PHQ-9 depression test, Fox News reported.
Dependency, a mood disorder which causes a persistent feeling of sadness and lost of interest, is categorized by feelings of severe despondency and dejection.
The upgraded phones of the subjects utilized GPS tracking to keep track of the participants’ locations throughout the study. The phones sent GPS coordinates every five minutes while pinging users several times a day with questions pertaining to their mood.
David Mohr, one of the study’s authors and the director of the Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies at Northwestern, was quoted by TIME as having said that he and his colleagues “found that the more time people spend on their phones, the more likely they are to be more depressed,” but the study’s findings didn’t end there, as Mohr went on to state that those “who tend to spend more time in just one or two places—like people who stay at home or go to work and go back home—are more likely to have higher depression scores.”
We found that the more time people spend on their phones, the more likely they are to be more depressed (…) People who tend to spend more time in just one or two places—like people who stay at home or go to work and go back home—are more likely to have higher depression scores
In other news, an unrelated study’s preliminary findings have found that depression treatment could reduce the risk of heart disease.
