author: Bart Swiatek
App Will Use Smartphone to Check Our Mental Health
Researchers at Dalhousie University in Canada have developed the PROSIT app, which allows for monitoring of the mental health of users by analyzing the way they use their smartphone.
IN A NUTSHELL:
- Researchers at Dalhousie University have developed the PROSIT application, which uses data from a smartphone to analyze our mental health;
- The app checks, among other things, the history of calls and text messages, monitors sleep length and exercise frequency;
- PROSIT is to be a complementary tool - it will not replace psychological care.
Smartphones have become an integral part of everyday life. Although the devices have many advantages and in many ways improve our lives, they can also become an object of addiction or have a negative impact on our psyche. It turns out that they are also a useful tool for examining the state of mind. Researchers from Dalhousie University of Canada have developed the PROSIT app (short for Predicting Risks and Outcomes of Social InTeractions), which allows for assessing of a person's mental health by analyzing the way they use a smartphone (via Gizmodo).
“We can actually find out whether they’re anxious or depressed. It’s fairly amazing. So you don’t have to understand any of the content, you can just listen to people and actually you get their emotional state from the way that they talk," told Dr Sandra Meier, a psychologist at the university, CBC.
The application uses the phone's built-in sensors and data from apps installed on the phone to check issues such as sleep length, exercise frequency, communication with others (through call and message history), time spent in front of the smartphone screen and the type of music we listen to.
"When people are emotional, when you’re angry, you want to send an emotional text. Not only the speed of your typing changes, but also the force you apply on the keyboard to type also changes," noted Rita Orji, a computer scientist in the team responsible for the app.
The amount of data collected can be of concern to people whose privacy and safety are priorities. The developers argue that an appropriate approach to this issue has been crucial to them from the beginning. All data collected by PROSIT is encrypted and stored in a secure location. What is more, the program does not cross certain boundaries - e.g. it does not check the content of messages or calls (only history). The application also requires users to create a short, ninety-second audio file every week to discuss the most exciting events of the last few days.
"Our app took user privacy, security and safety into consideration as the major design objective… from the very beginning of the app design," said Orji.
It is worth noting that PROSIT is not intended to replace professional psychological care, but to be a complementary tool. According to Dr Meier, the program facilitated the supervision of patients during the pandemic. Unfortunately, the app is currently in the phase of closed tests and is not available to the general public (it is used by about three hundred people, half of whom are patients).