Mobile Self-Tracking of Mental Health

Serious mental illnesses require years of monitoring and adjustments in treatment. Stress, substance abuse or reduced medication adherence cause rapid worsening of symptoms, with consequences that include job loss, homelessness, suicide, incarceration, and hospitalization. Treatment visits can be infrequent. Illness exacerbations usually occur with no clinician awareness, leaving little opportunity to make treatment adjustments. Tools are needed that quickly detect illness worsening. At least two thirds of Veterans with serious mental illness use a smartphone. These phones generate data that characterize sociability, activity and sleep. Changes in these are warning signs for relapse. Members of this project developed an app that monitors and transmits these mobile data. This project studies passive mobile sensing that allows Veterans to self-track their activities, sociability and sleep; and studies whether this can be used to track symptoms. The project intends to produce a mobile platform that monitors the clinical status of patients, identifies risk for relapse, and allows early intervention.