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The Rise of Big Data Psychiatry
The information captured by our smartphones, as well as new speech- and facial-recognition technologies, can yield invaluable insights for mental health professionals.
As a physician, I need to figure out three things when a new patient walks into my office: what their life is typically like, what has changed that made them seek treatment and what I can do to help them. It’s a complex problem, and most fields of medicine approach it by taking measurements. If I were a cardiologist evaluating a patient’s chest pain, for instance, I would speak with the patient, but then I would listen to their heart and measure their pulse and blood pressure. I might order an electrocardiogram or a cardiac stress test, tools that weren’t available a century ago.
Because I’m a psychiatrist, however, I evaluate patients in precisely the same way that my predecessors did in 1920: I ask them to tell me what’s wrong, and while they’re talking I carefully observe their speech and behavior. But psychiatry has remained largely immune to measurement. At no point in the examination do I gather numerical data about the patient’s life or behavior, even though tools for taking such measurements already exist. In fact, you likely are carrying one around in your pocket right now.
In the last decade, an entire industry has been built to predict a person’s behavior based on their smartphone use and online activity. Because our search and social media history is digitized and time stamped, it represents a permanent breadcrumb trail of our thoughts and emotions. Tech companies and governments already use these data to monitor and commodify our likes and dislikes; soon psychiatrists might be able to use them to measure and evaluate our mental state.
Our smartphones measure our movements with accelerometers, our location with GPS and our social engagement with the number of calls and texts we send. These data have extraordinary potential for psychiatric diagnosis and treatment. Studies have shown that the words we use to express ourselves on Facebook and Twitter can predict the emergence of conditions like postpartum depression and psychosis. A person’s recent Google search history, it turns out, is a better predictor of suicide than their clinician’s most recent notes.
https://telegra.ph/The-Rise-of-Big-Data-Psychiatry-04-29
via www.wsj.com
#smartphones #BigData #psychiatry #thinkabout
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv
The information captured by our smartphones, as well as new speech- and facial-recognition technologies, can yield invaluable insights for mental health professionals.
As a physician, I need to figure out three things when a new patient walks into my office: what their life is typically like, what has changed that made them seek treatment and what I can do to help them. It’s a complex problem, and most fields of medicine approach it by taking measurements. If I were a cardiologist evaluating a patient’s chest pain, for instance, I would speak with the patient, but then I would listen to their heart and measure their pulse and blood pressure. I might order an electrocardiogram or a cardiac stress test, tools that weren’t available a century ago.
Because I’m a psychiatrist, however, I evaluate patients in precisely the same way that my predecessors did in 1920: I ask them to tell me what’s wrong, and while they’re talking I carefully observe their speech and behavior. But psychiatry has remained largely immune to measurement. At no point in the examination do I gather numerical data about the patient’s life or behavior, even though tools for taking such measurements already exist. In fact, you likely are carrying one around in your pocket right now.
In the last decade, an entire industry has been built to predict a person’s behavior based on their smartphone use and online activity. Because our search and social media history is digitized and time stamped, it represents a permanent breadcrumb trail of our thoughts and emotions. Tech companies and governments already use these data to monitor and commodify our likes and dislikes; soon psychiatrists might be able to use them to measure and evaluate our mental state.
Our smartphones measure our movements with accelerometers, our location with GPS and our social engagement with the number of calls and texts we send. These data have extraordinary potential for psychiatric diagnosis and treatment. Studies have shown that the words we use to express ourselves on Facebook and Twitter can predict the emergence of conditions like postpartum depression and psychosis. A person’s recent Google search history, it turns out, is a better predictor of suicide than their clinician’s most recent notes.
https://telegra.ph/The-Rise-of-Big-Data-Psychiatry-04-29
via www.wsj.com
#smartphones #BigData #psychiatry #thinkabout
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv
Telegraph
The Rise of Big Data Psychiatry
As a physician, I need to figure out three things when a new patient walks into my office: what their life is typically like, what has changed that made them seek treatment and what I can do to help them. It’s a complex problem, and most fields of medicine…