Cellphone security blanket

16 July 2015 - 02:12 By ©The Daily Telegraph

Spending more than an hour on your cellphone each day might be a sign that you are suffering from depression, a new study suggests. The study, by Northwestern University, in the US, states that monitoring phone usage could be a simple way of assessing whether someone is feeling upbeat or down.The more time spent using a phone, for any reason - including texting and going online - the more likely it was that participants in the study were depressed. The average daily usage for depressed individuals was about 68 minutes, whereas for non-depressed individuals it was about 17 minutes.Monitoring people's comings and goings using GPS tracking on their phones also helped researchers evaluate emotional state. Spending most of your time at home or at a small number of locations was also linked to depression, as was having an irregular daily schedule, such as unusual shift patterns."When people are depressed they tend to withdraw and don't have the motivation or energy to go out and do things," said the senior author of the report on the study, David Mohr."The data showing that depressed people tend not to go to many places reflects the loss of motivation seen in depression."The significance of this is that we can detect if a person has depressive symptoms and gauge the severity of those symptoms without asking them questions. Phones can provide data unobtrusively and with no effort on the part of the user."Though the phone-usage data did not identify how people were using their phones, Mohr suspects that people who spent the most time on the phone were surfing the web or playing games and not chatting to friends.About one in 10 people suffers from anxiety or depression."People are likely, when on their phone, to avoid thinking about things that are troubling, painful feelings or difficult relationships," Mohr said. "It's an avoidance behaviour we see in depression."Based on the phone data, Northwestern scientists were able to identify people with depressive symptoms with 87% accuracy. They found the phone data were more reliable indicators than standard questions and asking participants how they were feeling on a scale of one to 10.The research could lead to monitoring people at risk of depression using their smartphones so healthcare providers could intervene.To determine the relationship between phone usage and geographic location, and depression, the subjects took a widely used standardised questionnaire designed to measure depression, the PHQ-9, at the beginning of the two-week study.The PHQ-9 asks about symptoms of depression, such as sadness, loss of pleasure, hopelessness, disturbances in sleep and appetite, and difficulty concentrating.Researchers are planning to follow up their study to see whether getting people to change their behaviour could improve their mood and alleviate depression.The study report will be published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.Last year Microsoft Labs said it was working on a programme that would detect whether a new mother was suffering from post-natal depression based on the language she used on social networking sites...

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