As we are using our phone all the time, it is with us through all our daily moods. What if our smart device could detect symptoms of our mental health problem?
As we all know, depression is a serious disease and according to the World Health Organization 2018 research more than 300 million people suffer from it. When you’re dealing with depression, it isn’t all in your head. It can disrupt sleep, regular eating and being social and active.
AI algorithms in our phones (identifying faces, responding to voices) can now spot the early signs of depression and even help in getting treatment when it’s needed!
In study carried by Stanford University team, video footage of depressed and non-depressed people was fed into machine – learning. It was trained to learn from verbal and non-verbal speech (facial expression, spoken words) and detect whether the person is depressed or not. In testing, it worked more than 80% of the time.
“Compared to physical illnesses, mental disorders are more difficult to detect,” the researchers write in a paper that is being presented at the NeurIPS AI conference in Montreal this week. “The burden of mental health is exacerbated by barriers to care such as social stigma, financial cost, and a lack of accessible treatment options […] This technology could be deployed to cell phones worldwide and facilitate low-cost universal access to mental health care.”
The researchers say that the studies are in their early stage and caution that the technology wouldn’t be a replacement for clinician.
According to the article from 14th of January 2018 on TedFellows, there already is such an app that helps in monitoring depression signs. It’s called HealthRythms and it uses mobile phone data and also gives doctors insight into their patient’s mental health. How does it work? The app monitors people’s way of using their phone (how long they sleep, where do they go, what apps do they use, what are their typing habits etc.) With such data, HealthRhythms detects when routines get disrupted, which can lead to depression.
There are more apps which are detecting mental health problems like “Purple Robot”, and these ones, which are helping with fighting already detected depression like “Moodkit” or “Talklife”.
Technology is definitely helping us with digitalizing and fastening the process of recognizing symptoms of diseases. I think that is a great way of using AI which can help people directly and raise their awareness of how serious our mental problem can be and how can it affect our life.
References:
https://fellowsblog.ted.com/how-we-can-use-smartphones-to-diagnose-and-treat-depression-adc4cf9ede8a
https://www.unilad.co.uk/articles/the-smartphone-app-that-can-detect-depression/
https://www.healthline.com/health/depression/top-iphone-android-apps#daylio
It seems very interesting. We are already tracking our daily habits such as sleep,workout,healthy food in order to improve our life. And now we will also be able to monitor a mental health. Sounds great, but here is only one thing that worries me. We are becoming more dependent on our smartphones and i still haven’t decided for myself whether this is good or bad.
Considering how the AI is developing we can expect everything. Our sleep patterns, facial expressions, social involvement can be measured and give us the results we wouldn’t even expect. With the apps like that there is also a huge chance for a false positive, since everyone is acting in their own manner. The question is, would you rely on it?
I am just wondering what might have happened happen to those remaining 20% of people who were misdiagnosed, it would be good to look at the research showing what was the effect on them in a long run.
Those who were told that they have depression (but actually did not) believed in the diagnosis and actually started being less happy and maybe even depressed or did they just let it go?
How about those who actually have had depression, but were reassured by the app that all is fine? Nobody wants to have a depression right? So, even if you feel like you have one and this smart app tells you, that you are ok, you think that you might just be exaggerating.
Putting criticism aside, it is really impressive how much future work of a psychologist it might save if you are diagnosed in early stages and how much better a person might be in their life it it happens.