The same smartwatch that counts your steps and hours of sleep can also offer mental health clinicians valuable information about depression symptoms, a Northeastern expert says in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Wearable technology is part of a focus on precision medicine that will allow clinicians to better tailor treatment for individual patients, says Joshua Curtiss, a Northeastern assistant professor of applied psychology and one of the article’s co-authors.
“The purpose of this type of research was to figure out if we can use passive sensor data to predict the things we care about — to see if it is associated with changes in depression severity or symptom severity,” Curtiss says.
“It showed the very individualized ways depression manifests in people,” he says.