mHealth
Can phone movement data flag changes in depression before they happen?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
When people's phones showed they were moving around less and visiting fewer places, their depression scores tended to rise afterwards, but changes in mood did not predict later changes in movement.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cohort — Prospective 16-week cohort with passive Android sensor collection and symptom questionnaires every 3 weeks; lagged repeated-measures correlations between changes in sensor features and later changes in symptoms, overall and within 4 symptom clusters.
- N
- N=282 · 282 participants overall; k-means symptom clusters contained 88 (minimal symptoms), 71 (depression and social anxiety), 69 (depression and anxiety) and 54 (multiple comorbidities).
- Population
- US adults with Android phones recruited through volunteer research registries, deliberately oversampled so at least half had moderate or worse depressive symptoms; people with bipolar or psychotic disorders were excluded.
- Outcome
- Changes in depression (PHQ-8), generalised anxiety (GAD-7) and social anxiety (SPIN) scores, correlated with prior 2-week changes in GPS, semantic location, communication and app-use features.
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Key findings
Increases in GPS-measured location variety, time patterns and travel were followed by decreases in depression scores, with modest correlations (for example r = -0.17 in the full sample and -0.36 in the group with multiple comorbidities). More active app use was linked to falling depression in the multiple-comorbidity group, and more phone calls to rising social anxiety in the depression and social anxiety group. No sensor features tracked later changes in generalised anxiety, and symptom changes did not predict later sensor changes.
Methodology
The researchers had 282 US adults install an app that passively logged GPS location, calls, texts and app use for 16 weeks, and every 3 weeks participants completed questionnaires on depression, generalised anxiety and social anxiety. They grouped participants into four symptom profiles and correlated changes in sensor features over two weeks with the next change in symptom scores, and also tested the reverse direction.
Limitations
The study was exploratory and observational, so it shows a time ordering, not that moving less causes depression to worsen; the authors say their hypotheses need confirmatory testing. Correlations were modest, and the authors state phone data alone are not good enough to monitor symptoms. Only Android users who volunteered through research registries took part, people with missing surveys had somewhat higher symptoms, and findings apply only to the 2-week lag examined. An unexpected positive link between time at exercise locations and depression was likely an artefact of many zero values.
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