Digital Phenotyping Correlations in Larger Mental Health Samples: Analysis and Replication

Background: Smartphones can facilitate patients completing surveys and collecting sensor data to gain insight into their mental health conditions. However, the utility of sensor data is still being explored. Prior studies have reported a wide range of correlations between passive data and survey scores.

Aims: To explore correlations in a large data-set collected with the mindLAMP app. Additionally, we explored whether passive data features could be used in models to predict survey results.

Method: Participants were asked to complete daily and weekly mental health surveys. After screening for data quality, our sample included 147 college student participants and 270 weeks of data. We examined correlations between six weekly surveys and 13 metrics derived from passive data features. Finally, we trained logistic regression models to predict survey scores from passive data with and without daily surveys.

Results: Similar to other large studies, our correlations were lower than prior reports from smaller studies. We found that the most useful features came from GPS, call, and sleep duration data. Logistic regression models performed poorly with only passive data, but when daily survey scores were included, performance greatly increased.

Conclusions: Although passive data alone may not provide enough information to predict survey scores, augmenting this data with short daily surveys can improve performance. Therefore, it may be that passive data can be used to refine survey score predictions and clinical utility may be derived from the combination of active and passive data.