This app notifies you when you’re depressed. But who else does it tell?
A FACEBOOK message pops up on my phone screen. “What’s going on in your world?”
It’s from a robot named Woebot, the brainchild of Stanford University psychologist Alison Darcy.
Woebot seems to care about me.
The app asks me for a list of my strengths, and remembers my response so it can encourage me later. It helps me set a goal for the week — being more productive at work.
It asks me about my moods and my energy levels and makes charts of them.
“I’ll help you recognise patterns because ... (no offence) humans aren’t great at that,” Woebot tells me with a smirking emoji.
So Woebot knows that I felt anxious on Wednesday and happy on Thursday. But who else might know? Unlike a pedometer, which tracks something as impersonal as footsteps, many mentalhealth apps in development rely on gathering and analysing information about a user’s intimate feelings and social life.
“Mental-health data is some of the most intimate data there can be,” said Adam Tanner, a fellow at Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science.
Technology might be a powerful tool to improve treatment, but an emotional problem, if it becomes known, can affect insurance coverage, ruin chances of landing a job or colour an employer’s perception. With possible changes coming to health-care law, it’s unclear if pre-existing mentalhealth conditions could once again be used to charge people more for insurance or deny them coverage.
Privacy concerns aside, the promise of collecting data is the ability to render a holistic picture of a person’s mental state that’s more accurate than infrequent assessments conducted in a doctor’s office.
“Our approach is to ask, how can we measure in an unobtrusive and passive way?” said Tom Insel, former director of the National Institutes of Mental Health.
Insel teamed up in May with Paul Dagum, a former cybersecurity expert, to create a startup that mines the information on consumers’ phones to create “digital biomarkers” to try to predict depression, anxiety and schizophrenia.
Called Mindstrong, the company tracks users’ every tap, swipe and keystroke, then keeps an eye out for patterns such as reaction speeds. It looks at locations and frequency of texts and calls. It also tracks word use. Without reading people’s emails, Mindstrong can look at “word histograms” that show how frequently certain words are used.
When people become depressed, “there’s a shift in pronouns, instead of saying ‘we, you, they,’ it turns into ‘I,I, I,’ ” Insel said.
Early evidence shows Mindstrong may be onto something. Dagum said they’ve found strong correlations between phone behaviour and traditional cognitive measures. Mindstrong is running a 100person study with Stanford and plans to publish its results soon.