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In this mini-review, we discuss the fundamentals of using technology in mental health diagnosis and tracking. We highlight those principles using two clinical concepts: (1) cravings and relapse in the context of addictive disorders and (2) anhedonia in the context of depression. This manuscript is useful for both clinicians wanting to understand the scope of technology use in psychiatry and for computer scientists and engineers wishing to assess psychiatric frameworks useful for diagnosis and treatment. The increase in smartphone ownership and internet connectivity, as well as the accelerated development of wearable devices, have made the observation and analysis of human behavior patterns possible. This has, in turn, paved the way to understand mental health conditions better. These technologies have immense potential in facilitating the diagnosis and tracking of mental health conditions; they also allow the implementation of existing behavioral treatments in new contexts (e.g., remotely, online, and in rural/underserved areas), and the possibility to develop new treatments based on new understanding of behavior patterns. The path to understand how to best use technology in mental health includes the need to match interdisciplinary frameworks from engineering/computer sciences and psychiatry. Thus, we start our review by introducing bio-behavioral sensing, the types ofmore »information available, and what behavioral patterns they may reflect and be related to in psychiatric diagnostic frameworks. This information is linked to the use of functional imaging, highlighting how imaging modalities can be considered “ground truth” for mental health/psychiatric dimensions, given the heterogeneity of clinical presentations, and the difficulty of determining what symptom corresponds to what disease. We then discuss how mental health/psychiatric dimensions overlap, yet differ from, psychiatric diagnoses. Using two clinical examples, we highlight the potential agreement areas in assessment/management of anhedonia and cravings. These two dimensions were chosen because of their link to two very prevalent diseases worldwide: depression and addiction. Anhedonia is a core symptom of depression, which is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide. Cravings, the urge to use a substance or perform an action (e.g., shopping, internet), is the leading step before relapse. Lastly, through the manuscript, we discuss potential mental health dimensions.« less

The ability to objectively measure aspects of performance and behavior is a fundamental pillar of digital health, enabling digital wellness products, decentralized trial concepts, evidence generation, digital therapeutics, and more. Emerging multimodal technologies capable of measuring several modalities simultaneously and efforts to integrate inputs across several sources are further expanding the limits of what digital measures can assess. Experts from the field of digital health were convened as part of a multi-stakeholder workshop to examine the progress of multimodal digital measures in two key areas: detection of disease and the measurement of meaningful aspects of health relevant to the quality of life. Here we present a meeting report, summarizing key discussion points, relevant literature, and finally a vision for the immediate future, including how multimodal measures can provide value to stakeholders across drug development and care delivery, as well as three key areas where headway will need to be made if we are to continue to build on the encouraging progress so far: collaboration and data sharing, removal of barriers to data integration, and alignment around robust modular evaluation of new measurement capabilities.

Circadian rhythms influence multiple essential biological activities, including sleep, performance, and mood. The dim light melatonin onset (DLMO) is the gold standard for measuring human circadian phase (i.e., timing). The collection of DLMO is expensive and time consuming since multiple saliva or blood samples are required overnight in special conditions, and the samples must then be assayed for melatonin. Recently, several computational approaches have been designed for estimating DLMO. These methods collect daily sampled data (e.g., sleep onset/offset times) or frequently sampled data (e.g., light exposure/skin temperature/physical activity collected every minute) to train learning models for estimating DLMO. One limitation of these studies is that they only leverage one time-scale data. We propose a two-step framework for estimating DLMO using data from both time scales. The first step summarizes data from before the current day, whereas the second step combines this summary with frequently sampled data of the current day. We evaluate three moving average models that input sleep timing data as the first step and use recurrent neural network models as the second step. The results using data from 207 undergraduates show that our two-step model with two time-scale features has statistically significantly lower root-mean-square errors than models thatmore »use either daily sampled data or frequently sampled data.« less

Shift workers who are essential contributors to our society, face high risks of poor health and wellbeing. To help with their problems, we collected and analyzed physiological and behavioral wearable sensor data from shift working nurses and doctors, as well as their behavioral questionnaire data and their self-reported daily health and wellbeing labels, including alertness, happiness, energy, health, and stress. We found the similarities and differences between the responses of nurses and doctors. According to the differences in self-reported health and wellbeing labels between nurses and doctors, and the correlations among their labels, we proposed a job-role based multitask and multilabel deep learning model, where we modeled physiological and behavioral data for nurses and doctors simultaneously to predict participants’ next day’s multidimensional self-reported health and wellbeing status. Our model showed significantly better performances than baseline models and previous state-of-the-art models in the evaluations of binary/3-class classification and regression prediction tasks. We also found features related to heart rate, sleep, and work shift contributed to shift workers’ health and wellbeing.