An app recently found can analyze your phone using habit to test for mental illness. Mindstrong Health, a startup in Palo Alto, California, is attempting to seek the linkage between depression and the device in our pocket.
A smartphone app is used to gather people’s cognition and emotional health by look into their way of using smartphones. After the installation of the app, it monitors things like the way the person types, taps, and scrolls while using other the device. It encrypts and analyzes remotely using machine learning, and the results are shared with the patient and the patient’s doctor.
According to MindStrong’s research, how you interact with your phone reveals important clues to your mental health. For example, a relapse of depression; with details collected from the app, users are informed when something may be amiss and can then check in with the patient by sending a message through the app and the other way around. From a research into a hundred and fifty subjects, it is found that the behaviors can tell a lot about you health.
“There were signals in there that were measuring, correlating—predicting, in fact, not just correlating with—the neurocognitive function measures that the neuropsychologist had taken,” said Paul Dagum Mindstrong, founder and CEO. For example, memory problems, which are common hallmarks of brain disorders, can be discovered by investigating the typing speed and error frequency (such as how frequently you delete characters), as well as by how fast you scroll even when you’re just using the smartphone’s keyboard. You’re switching your attention from one task to another all the time—for example, when you’re inserting punctuation into a sentence.
The app can be a great innovation for people tackling depression, or schizophrenia, substance abuse and a lot of greater benefits on the way. The company has data to confirm its science and technology. It is continuing to perform numerous studies, and this past March it began working with patients and doctors.
However, the fact that the app is currently collecting user’s health record could lead to violation, theft, attack if it is not carefully supervised and protected. According to the first layer of AIWS 7-layer Model developed by Michael Dukakis Institute, a set of ethical standards for technology, transparency in application and design of the technology need to be transparent.
