Smartphone accelerometer data as a proxy for clinical data in modeling of bipolar disorder symptom trajectory

A paper published by the BiAffect team — Casey C. Bennett, Mindy K. Ross, EuGene Baek, Dohyeon Kim & Alex D. Leow — in Nature npj Digital Medicine examining whether smartphone accelerometer data (alone or in concert with typing dynamics) may serve as a proxy for traditional clinical data.

Read the full journal article in npj Digital Medicine here

Abstract
Being able to track and predict fluctuations in symptoms of mental health disorders such as bipolar disorder outside the clinic walls is critical for expanding access to care for the global population. To that end, we analyze a dataset of 291 individuals from a smartphone app targeted at bipolar disorder, which contains rich details about their smartphone interactions (including typing dynamics and accelerometer motion) collected everyday over several months, along with more traditional clinical features. The aim is to evaluate whether smartphone accelerometer data could serve as a proxy for traditional clinical data, either by itself or in combination with typing dynamics. Results show that accelerometer data improves the predictive performance of machine learning models by nearly 5% over those previously reported in the literature based only on clinical data and typing dynamics. This suggests it is possible to elicit essentially the same “information” about bipolar symptomology using different data sources, in a variety of settings.