Can typographical errors give an idea of your mental health?
Can typographical errors give an idea of your mental health?
The latest portable technology can reliably track the heartbeat and notify users of any irregularities. Until next time? Reliable monitoring of your brain and mental health.
A team of researchers from the Depression and Resilience Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago is working on a technology that could monitor the mood and cognition of users, important indicators of mental health stress, by tracking their patterns of writing with an iPhone application called BiAffect. Initial research has found that it is possible to predict episodes of mania and depression among users with bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder based on changes in their writing habits.
For example, a manic episode may be preceded by an increasing number of typographical errors, faster writing, more frequent use of the "delete" key, or tremors detected by the phone's accelerometer, which measures the inclination and orientation of the device . During depressive episodes, users withdraw from their personal technology and tend to send short and infrequent messages.
"It does not track what you write, but how you write it," says Dr. Alex Leow, an associate professor at the university's School of Medicine and principal investigator of the project.
"
Instead of waiting until the patient shows up at someone's office to intervene, they can perform the intervention in real time through the same device that controls their symptoms.
'
The BiAffect study is part of a larger trend in psychology to try to measure how the brain works by using the "digital escape" of users' daily interactions with technology. There are more than 10,000 applications related to mental health in the App Store, according to the most recent count of the National Institute of Mental Health.
The problem is that evidence-supported applications such as BiAffect that can substantiate their effectiveness claims represent only 3% of that total, says Dr. Adam Haim, a NIMH expert in mental health applications. "There are many promises," he says, "but there are also many false promises."
NIMH believes that the development of digitally delivered interventions is a priority because they have the potential to make treatment available to more people, lower drug change rates, reduce hospitalizations, and perhaps reduce medical costs in the long term.
However, applications such as BiAffect that collect data passively include a series of ethical concerns, mostly related to privacy. False positives can have costly consequences for users if an application fails to correctly identify the data or does not comply with federal health data protection standards, says Dr. Haim. People "need to understand the possible implications of opening up to the disclosure of data to a third party," he says.
The goal of BiAffect is to be "as unobtrusive as possible," says Dr. Leow. After downloading the application, users participate in the study and allow the specially encoded BiAffect keyboard to replace the default version of their iPhone. The application then operates behind the scenes each time a person uses their phone, compiling a treasure trove of objective data.
The objective of this approach, the researchers say, is to conduct an impartial real-time assessment of the mental state of users in their natural environments. Typical mental health assessments are conducted by surveying patients in their moods through questionnaires or in-person meetings in clinical settings, and are prone to biases of self-reporting and other failures in collection.
The researchers made BiAffect available to the general public on the App Store in March and since then it has generated more than 8,150 hours of data from more than 1,300 users. The application was created as part of Mood Challenge, a competition funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that challenged researchers to find new ways to use Apple Inc.'s open source application development platform, ResearchKit, to study disorders Mood.
The creators of BiAffect did not intentionally limit the application for use in clinical settings, although they believe it could be more effective when mental health professionals use them to monitor their patients. Such use is likely to be several years away, said Dr. Olusola Ajilore, an associate professor of psychiatry at the BiAffect team.
But the researchers hope the application will finally allow doctors to offer interventions just in time. "Instead of waiting until the patient shows up at someone's office to intervene, they can perform the intervention in real time through the same device that controls their symptoms," he says.
Write to Laine Higgins in laine.higgins@wsj.com
.
!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s)
{if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod?
n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};
if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0';
n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;
t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,'script',
'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js');
fbq('init', '369524843414444');
fbq('track', 'PageView');
.
SOURCE LINK ERESVIRAL.COM https://www.beviral.online
Comentarios
Publicar un comentario