GPS, mobile app provide further insights into mental health

Psychology researchers are utilizing GPS to measure levels of depression and its effects on patients. A study, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, used GPS tracking and mobile applications to assess the correlation between daily experiences, continuous depression, anxiety and the tendency to become isolated.

To determine the relationship between everyday emotional experiences, the amount of time spent at home in isolation and whether depression and anxiety played a part, researchers utilized the advancements in mobile technology to continuously monitor patients. Where previous studies relied on self-reporting, which can be inaccurate, GPS and mobile apps data gave researchers a clearer view of a patient’s emotional state.

The study included 72 undergraduate students who had installed Sensus, a mobile app that included GPS location data tracking and questionnaires for self-reporting. The app prompted participants to report on their emotional state up to six times a day, occurring at random, and collected GPS location data every 150 minutes for continually monitoring.

Results showed that higher rates of anxiety and negative emotions resulted in more lime spent at home the next day.

“This study indicates that it is possible to integrate GPS data, a commonly available source of data from mobile phones, with repeated in situ sampling of (positive and negative) affect to enhance understanding of the relationship between affect and time spent at home, and its interaction with depression and social anxiety,” concluded Philip Chow, PhD, lead author of the study, and colleagues. “Results demonstrate the feasibility and utility of modeling the relationship between affect and homestay using fine-grained GPS data. Although these findings must be replicated in a larger study and with clinical samples, they suggest that integrating repeated state affect assessments in situ with continuous GPS data can increase understanding of how actual homestay is related to affect in everyday life and to symptoms of anxiety and depression.”