Researchers Create an App to Track Users’ Mental Health via Smartphones

Jul. 25, 2020

So tracking your physical fitness with the help of yoursmartphoneor asmart wearablehas become old news by now. So, scientists and developers are now trying tofocus more on mental health. As a result, now we have an app that cantrack your mental healthby analyzing the usage of your smartphone.

Researchers at Dalhousie University have developedan app called PROSIT which can tell whether you are showing symptoms of anxiety and depression by monitoring your phone usagewhich includes call frequency, music taste, easy to track features like fitness, sleep, etc, it also catches hold of some minor details like your typing speed and force.

Users can also add additional data. For instance, they have an option to record and upload a 90-second audio clip describing the most happening incident of the week and can also report their own feelings on a scale of 1 to 5.

The researchers have been testing out the app with 300 usersand half of them are patients trying to recover from mental illnesses.

Now, although the idea of the app is pretty useful, monitoring the usage of the smartphone can reveal some personal info of the users. So,obviously there are privacy concerns involved in tracking your online activity.

However, according to the researchers, the team is working on the app to minimize the privacy concerns of the users. Currently,the users need to sign a consent form, and the data supposedly remains in a secure place, according to the researchers.

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