Sensing behavioral symptoms of mental health and delivering personalized interventions using mobile technologies

Unlike most other health conditions, the treatment of mental illness relies on subjective measurement. In addition, the criteria for diagnosing mental illnesses are based on broad categories of symptoms that do not account for individual deviations from these criteria. The increasing availability of personal digital devices, such as smartphones that are equipped with sensors, offers a new opportunity to continuously and passively measure human behavior in situ. This promises to lead to more precise assessment of human behavior and ultimately individual mental health. More refined modeling of individual mental health and a consideration of individual context, assessed through continuous monitoring, opens the way for more precise and personalized digital interventions that may help increase the number of positive clinical outcomes in mental healthcare. In this paper, we provide a conceptual review of such techniques for measuring, modeling, and treating mental illness and maintaining mental health.