Today, the rates of depression especially among teenagers are in a constant rise. One of the challenges of psychiatrists is to diagnose these types of conditions. However, researchers from the Northwestern University have developed a new mobile application called Purple Robot that could detect depression.
This mobile app can incur data from the many sensors in the smartphone including location, movement, and patterns of use. This could create an objective tool to determine if the person has depression.
"The main reason for the development of the app is to see if we can objectively and passively identify if people are depressed," a research fellow at the Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine, Sohrob Saeb, told Phone Arena.
The researchers used the data from 28 people whom half of them have depression. According to the results, 87 percent success rate was incurred in diagnosing depression. They added that people suffering from depression were four times more likely to use their phones than those who were normal, reports Times of India.
They added that based on the tracking on their phones revealed that people with depressive symptoms were likely to visit lesser physical locations and spent more time at home. They actually spent an average of 68 minutes a day staring at their phones or other devices.
David Mohr, Director of the Centre for Behavioral Intervention Technologies at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said that, "Depressed people were turning to their smartphones to perhaps avoid thinking about other things that are troubling them."
He added, "The significance of this is we can detect if a person has depressive symptoms and the severity of those symptoms without asking them any questions.We now have an objective measure of behavior related to depression."
The applications provide no bias in diagnosing depression unlike questionnaires wherein the patients could alter their answers. The researchers also discovered that smartphone data was more reliable in identifying depressive symptoms than daily questions which could be rehearsed or altered.