Automatically generated smartphone data and subjective stress in healthy individuals - a pilot study
Maria Faurholt-Jepsen1, Helga Þórarinsdóttir1, Maj Vinberg1
1The Copenhagen Affective Disorder research Centre (CADIC), Psychiatric Centre Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Nordic Journal of Psychiatry
|December 28, 2019
Summary
Smartphone data did not correlate with stress levels in healthy individuals. This study suggests current smartphone metrics may not effectively monitor subjective stress in general populations.
Area of Science:
- Digital health
- Psychological assessment
- Behavioral monitoring
Background:
- Stress is a common human experience.
- Increased smartphone use offers potential for novel stress monitoring.
- Investigating smartphone data's association with subjective stress in healthy individuals is warranted.
Purpose of the Study:
- To determine if automatically generated smartphone data correlates with perceived stress.
- To assess associations with smartphone-based stress, perceived stress (Cohen's PSS), functioning (FAST), and depressive symptoms (HDRS).
Main Methods:
- A cohort of 40 healthy blood donors used a stress-monitoring app for 16 weeks.
- Baseline and end-of-study assessments included Cohen's PSS, FAST, and HDRS.
- Linear mixed-effects and linear regression models analyzed associations between smartphone data and health metrics.
Main Results:
- No statistically significant associations were found between smartphone data and perceived stress, functioning, or depressive symptoms.
- For example, outgoing text messages per day showed no significant link to self-assessed stress (B = 0.30, p = 0.40).
Conclusions:
- Participants reported low stress levels throughout the study.
- Automatically generated smartphone data did not capture subjective stress in this cohort.
- Findings should be interpreted cautiously due to the small sample size and low stress levels.
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