Digital phenotyping using smartphones could help steer mental health treatment

Despite decades of research, psychiatrists still don't have reliable biomarkers to trace the path of human misery.The complexity and heterogeneity of psychiatric conditions means that there are no biopsies for bipolar disorder and no blood tests or brain scans to indicate the depths of someone's depression.Even once diagnosed and offered treatment, many patients struggle to improve because they miss appointments, don't take medication, and fail to realize when their state of mind is about to take a downturn.But a potentially helpful tool may already-quite literally-be in hand.By tracking the way that those with psychiatric conditions use their smartphones, such as the frequency of their battery charging, the number of calls and messages they send, where they spend their time, or how well they sleep, researchers are finding characteristic types of behavior.Called digital phenotypes, these patterns could signal early warnings of relapse and track symptom severity, or simply show when a clinician should check in with a vulnerable person.Still, even as proponents hone digital phenotyping for mental health, they've yet to rigorously demonstrate its effectiveness on a large scale-studies to date are relatively small, and researchers often don't share the same software platforms, making it difficult to compare results.Others worry about privacy and the way such information could be abused."We have to definitely take into account that there are a lot of risks that are associated with the implementation of these tools," says