Article Excerpt: Lisa Marsch, the center’s director, said developing effective mobile mental health technologies means first exploring several questions: Do people use these apps? Do they actually work? And how do you make sure the people who might benefit most from these tools actually engage with them?
One of the center’s researchers, Dror Ben-Zeev, has worked on apps that capture data from people living with schizophrenia. When the app detects that someone’s symptoms are escalating, Marsch said, it can direct that person to engage in behavioral strategies – breathing exercises, for example – to try to prevent a psychotic episode.
Other projects are exploring how to leverage the myriad data captured inside a cell phone’s sensors – sound coming in through its microphone, location information, light exposure and more – to monitor patterns that would be indicative of mental health problems, Marsch said. Researchers are, for example, monitoring whether the levels of ambient light in someone’s room or certain speech patterns can measure depression or sociability levels, she said.
Full Article: https://tinyurl.com/4mk9hvpb
Article Source: Concord Monitor