According to Time magazine’s review of the new research, scientists took 28 people aged between 19-58. The people were selected from an advert placed on Craigslist. The group handed in their smartphones and the devices were tweaked and then handed back. To each smartphone, the scientists added location-and-usage monitoring software.
Each participant was given a questionnaire to complete. This was a standard set of questions, used by medics, to assess depressive symptoms. It was found that around half of the participants had symptoms of depression, whereas the other half did not.
For a two week period the phones tracked GPS location information. Messages were also sent to each person about their mood, several times a day. The phone use, location and mood response data was collated and analyzed.
The outcome, according to David Mohr, director of the Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, who led the study, was: “We found that the more time people spend on their phones, the more likely they are to be more depressed.”
It also seemed that gathering phone data was a reliable predictor of depression, with the algorithm deployed by the researchers having an 87 percent success rate.
While the results are interesting and they may well reveal certain tendencies, the study was very small and the group were users of a particular social media platform. Furthermore the groups were not evenly matched for age and gender. Neither did the study factor in employment or unemployment, or consider the history of mental illness. Further study will be needed to ascertain whether the results are reproducible.
The findings have been published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. The paper is called “Mobile Phone Sensor Correlates of Depressive Symptom Severity in Daily-Life Behavior: An Exploratory Study.”
