Mixed reactions on the development of digital biomarkers and growth of Mindstrong Health

___ (More on the positive side, at MIT Technology Review) The smartphone app that can tell you’re depressed before you know it yourself: “There are about 45 million people in the US alone with a mental illness, and those illnesses and their courses of treatment can vary tremendously. But there is something most of those people have in common: a smartphone… Mindstrong Health is using a smartphone app to collect measures of people’s cognition and emotional health as indicated by how they use their phones. Once a patient installs Mindstrong’s app, it monitors things like the way the person types, taps, and scrolls while using other apps. This data is encrypted and analyzed remotely using machine learning, and the results are shared with the patient and the patient’s medical provider. The seemingly mundane minutiae of how you interact with your phone offers surprisingly important clues to your mental health, according to Mindstrong’s research—revealing, for example, a relapse of depression…If Mindstrong’s method works, it could be the first that manages to turn the technology in your pocket into the key to helping patients with a wide range of chronic brain disorders—and may even lead to ways to diagnose them before they start.” (More on the skeptic side, at Nature) Happy with a 20% chance of sadness: “At this stage, the reliability of mood-prediction technology is unclear. Few results have been published, and groups that have released results ...
Source: SharpBrains - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Cognitive Neuroscience Health & Wellness Technology app bioethics brain disorders chronic chronic brain disorders cognition depression digital biomarkers emotional-health machine-learning Mental-Health mental-illness Mindstro Source Type: blogs