Cell Phone Use Identifies Depressed Individuals, Study Suggests

Your cell phone probably thrills you. But Northwestern University researchers find out a  novel method that surprisingly identifies depression too, according to discovery.

Spending more than an hour a day with the cell phone for company can actually make you more depressed than using it for just 17 minutes a day.

"People are likely, when on their phones, to avoid thinking about things that are troubling, painful feelings or difficult relationships," explains Northwestern's David Mohr in a study that researched the link between cell phones and depression. "It's an avoidance behavior we see in depression."

Moreover, GPS tracking showed that depressed persons would use their phones in less places, even while those who are not depressed went out of their homes often.

It is quite surprising that cell phone-sourced data has been 87% accurate in identifying subjects with depressive symptoms.

"Mobile phones are becoming the most ubiquitous consumer device in our world," the researchers say. "Equipped with powerful sensing, computation and communication capabilities, mobile phones-specifically smartphones-can continuously monitor an individual's context including physical activity, location and environment," according to rdmag.

"We can detect if a person has depressive symptoms and the severity of those symptoms without asking them any questions," says Mohr. "We now have an objective measure of behavior related to depression. And we're detecting it passively. Phones can provide data unobtrusively and with no effort on the part of the user."

Mohr's research is published in the July 15 edition of the Journal of Medical Internet Research.