With the dawn of the smartphone, it feels like many of us are more attached to our iPhones or Androids than to our human counterparts. And like any good partner, our smartphone may know us better than we know ourselves.
According to a new study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, our phones may be more accurate than us self-assessing ourselves in determining whether or not you suffer from depression. The researchers claim that phone data can predict whether or not an individual displays signs of depression with an accuracy of 87 percent, just by examining the amount of time an individual spends on their smartphone.
“We found that the more time people spend on their phones, the more likely they are to be more depressed”, says study author, David Mohr, to Time magazine. David Mohr, director of the Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, has also stated the fact that spending ample amounts of time on one’s phone is primarily linked with spending a lot of time at home or by oneself, two potential symptoms of depression.
To conduct their study, the researchers used Craigslist to recruit a sample size of 28 individuals, between the ages of 19 and 58. The participants installed an app developed by the researchers, called Purple Robot, which tracked the user’s location, movement, phone usage and other relevant activities. For two weeks, Purple Robot collected information every five minutes and sent it back to the researchers for analysis. The app also asked users about their mood and feelings throughout the day. A nine-question test commonly used to survey signs of depression, known as PHQ-9, was compared against the data and study authors found that Purple Robot had successfully identified 87 percent of those considered at risk for depression.
Purple Robot examined data regarding those who used their phones the most without actually taking or making calls, so just browsing the Web, playing games and texting, and the app was able to predict who would fall into the at-risk category with a 74 percent accuracy.
However, none of this means that if you just enjoy the occasional stay-at-home-wearing-sweatpants-and-watching-bad-movies day that you’re immediately a certainty for depression. Study authors themselves have noted that their study population is small as was their trial period, thus leaving plenty of room for error. They do plan on conducting the study again with a greater number of participants and over a longer period of time. Ethan Berke, an epidemiologist at Dartmouth College who was not involved in the study, told The Verge that, “It’s a very small study, and they didn’t get data over a long period of time, but those things aside, it definitely advances our knowledge base.” Justin Baker, a psychiatrist at Harvard University, agrees, saying, “The study’s novelty is in showing that tracking this information across many individuals is possible – and does a decent job at predicting depression scores.”
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