Personalized Mood Prediction from Patterns of Behavior Collected with Smartphones

Abstract

AbstractOver the last ten years, there has been considerable progress in using digital behavioral phenotypes, captured passively and continuously from smartphones and wearable devices, to infer mood and diagnose major depressive disorder. However, most digital phenotype studies suffer from poor replicability, often fail to detect clinically relevant events, and use measures of depression that are not validated or suitable for collecting large and longitudinal data. Here, we report high-quality longitudinal validated assessments of mood from computerized adaptive testing paired with continuous digital assessments of behavior from smartphone sensors for up to 40 weeks on 183 individuals experiencing mild to severe symptoms of depression. We apply a novel combination of cubic spline interpolation and idiographic models to generate individualized predictions of future mood from the digital behavioral phenotypes, achieving high prediction accuracy of depression severity up to three weeks in advance (R2≥ 80%). We show that the passive behavioral phenotypes enhance prediction of future mood over and above a baseline model which predicts future mood based on past depression severity alone for 52% of individuals in our cohort. In conclusion, our study verified the feasibility of obtaining high-quality longitudinal assessments of mood from a clinical population and predicting symptom severity weeks in advance using passively collected digital behavioral data. Our results indicate the possibility of expanding the repertoire of patient-specific behavioral measures to enable future psychiatric research.