How your Smartphone Can Help Diagnose Depression

A new study found out that the length of time of phone usage as well as places visited, recorded by smartphone GPS, can be correlated to depressive symptoms, CBS News reports.

The study from the Northwestern University in Illinois, published in the Journal Medical of Internet Resource, says that a depressed person's average time of phone usage is approximately 68 minutes, while non-depressed persons have been found to stay on the phone for 17 minutes per day, writes CNN.

Utilizing a sensor acquisition data app called "Purple Robot," subjects of the study were engaged with a sensor which recorded their mobile location, movement and phone usage on a daily basis for two weeks after answering a depression-indicator questionnaire. The participants consisted of 28 men and women between 19 to 58 years old. CNN says that Purple Robot recorded that 87 percent of the subject participants have a possible risk of depression.

"I imagine what the researchers ultimately want to do is create a better and more easily deliverable assessment of how people are doing mental health-wise so that they can then deliver interventions to those folks in a way that reduces the burdens of getting treatments they might otherwise not get," said Lee Ritterband, Director of the Behavioral Health and Technology Lab at the University of Virginia Health System, to CBS News.

The correlation reveals that the longer the time a person spends on his/her mobile phone, the more likely he/she is depressed. At the same time, the less places he/she visited, the more likely he/she experiences less motivation to engage him/herself to activities.

David C. Mohr, one of the authors of the study told CBS News, "This makes sense clinically."

"When people are depressed they tend to lose motivation and engage in life and they tend to withdraw. We speculate that the relationship between increased phone use -- most likely app use, not communication -- and higher depression is a reflection of people tending to use the phone to distract themselves from emotional pain or to avoid stressful situation," he adds. 

Mohr further notes that the findings of the study are consistent with other depression studies. He also added that the patterns of phone usage and depression can also be associated with lack of sleep, non-eating habits or lack of appetite, and changes in mood.

Sohrob Saeb, a postdoctoral researcher and one of the developers of Purple Robot said to CNN that the ultimate goal of the app is to "objectively and passively identify if people are depressed."