Building the foundations for global data banking in digital phenotyping for mental health

Mental illness is a leading cause of global disability, underscoring the urgent need for scalable, data-driven approaches to early identification and intervention. Passive sensing technologies in mobile and wearable devices enable continuous and unobtrusive measurement of behavioural and physiological signals that may be relevant to mental health. When translated into interpretable digital markers through digital phenotyping, these data hold significant promise for advancing our understanding of the onset, course, and treatment of mental disorders. However, achieving real-world clinical utility requires large-scale, harmonised, and ethically governed databanks that enable replication and generalisability for diverse populations. Informed by recent international initiatives, the academic literature, and our own expertise in digital phenotyping, this Perspective outlines four key priorities for advancing digital phenotyping databanks in depression and anxiety. First, ensuring data quality through standardisation and harmonisation is essential to comparability across studies and to prevent fragmentation. Second, ethical data stewardship demands hybrid consent models that combine the scalability of broad consent with the flexibility of dynamic consent, ensuring meaningful participant control as analytics evolve. Third, robust, privacy-preserving information governance co-created with people with Lived Experience is vital to maintain trust and prevent misuse, with federated learning and open-source pipelines offering promising technical pathways. Finally, the field must promote data reuse by reforming incentive structures, recognising databank-based scholarship, and investing in sustainable infrastructures that reward secondary analyses. Collectively, these priorities offer a pragmatic framework for building equitable, transparent, and scientifically robust digital mental health databanks. Implementing these recommendations will require sustained international collaboration among researchers, funders, institutions, and people with Lived Experience. By aligning scientific rigour with ethical responsibility, digital phenotyping databanks can become transformative tools for advancing the global understanding and treatment of mental illness.