The researchers with the innovation belong to the American School of Medicine “Mount Sinai”, which fully funded the study, and this feature should be available in smartwatches after the completion of other studies.
According to the study, published Tuesday in the journal “Jamia Open”, the algorithms developed by the researchers are able to take advantage of information collected by smartwatches about the state of our bodies, such as heart rate, and use them to provide insight into mental health.
The researchers point out that mental health disorders are very common, accounting for 13% of all illnesses worldwide, and that a quarter of the world’s population suffers from mental illness at any given time, but the possibilities of assessing the mental health are very limited.
It is hoped that the application of the system, which the researchers recently developed in smartwatches, will open a great door to facilitate the monitoring and evaluation of psychological states.
How it works?
The study’s first author, Robert B. Bergers, for “Sky News Arabia”:
Wearable devices like smartwatches collect information about your body’s health, such as the number of steps taken and your heart rate, and calculate small time differences between each heartbeat. This data reflects the activity of a person’s autonomic nervous system, or part of the nervous system that controls the body outside of our control, as this part of the nervous system is also affected by stress. We show that these nervous system measurements, collected from smartwatches, can be used to predict an individual’s psychological state and other mental health attributes. The research sample included 329 people, but more work is needed to improve the algorithms’ ability to predict psychological state and assess it in other samples. However, our results demonstrate that this type of psychological prediction using wearable data is possible.
What mental disorders do the algorithms predict?
For his part, study co-author Dr. Zahi Fayyad, director of the Institute of Medical Engineering and Bioimaging at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, told Sky News Arabia:
Our study assessed the ability to predict psychological resilience, which is the ability of individuals to react to changing situations, and the ability to restore balance after going through adversity or extreme experience. We found that it can predict positive psychological constructs, such as individuals’ resilience, optimism, and emotional support. We are currently working on further optimizing our algorithms and evaluating them in larger groups of people to improve their accuracy, and we will do more research before considering the algorithms on a larger scale, or in smartwatch systems.
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