Application of a Mobile Health Data Platform for Public Health Surveillance: A Case Study in Stress Monitoring and Prediction

Background: Public health surveillance involves the collection, analysis and dissemination of data to improve population health. The main sources of data for public health decision-making are surveys, typically comprised of self-report which may be subject to biases, costs and delays. To complement subjective data, objective measures from sensors could potentially be used. Specifically, advancements in personal mobile and wearable technologies enable the collection of real-time and continuous health data.

Objective: In this context, the goal of this work is to apply a mobile health platform (MHP) that extracts health data from the Apple Health repository to collect data in daily-life scenarios and use it for the prediction of stress, a major public health issue.

Methods: A pilot study was conducted with 45 participants over 2 weeks, using the MHP to collect stress-related data from Apple Health and perceived stress self-reports. Apple, Withings and Empatica devices were distributed to participants and collected a wide range of data, including heart rate, sleep, blood pressure, temperature, and weight. These were used to train random forests and support vector machines. The SMOTE technique was used to handle imbalanced datasets.

Results: Accuracy and f1-macro scores were in line with state-of-the-art models for stress prediction above 60% for the majority of analyses and samples analysed. Apple Watch sleep features were particularly good predictors, with most models with these data achieving results around 70%.

Conclusions: A system such as the MHP could be used for public health data collection, complementing traditional self-reporting methods when possible. The data collected with the system was promising for monitoring and predicting stress in a population.