Technologies can detect bipolar disorder mood swings – study
Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital discovered that technologies such as fitness trackers can detect time intervals when patients are experiencing depression or mania.
Bipolar disorder was formally known as ‘manic depression’ and it is a mental health condition that causes extreme mood swings. The condition can’t be cured but treatments such as medicines and talking therapies are available to help individuals manage it.
What’s more, a new study that was published yesterday in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica revealed that personal devices like smartphones and smartwatches could help treatment.
Arguably the study couldn’t have come at a better time as statistics show an estimated 40 million people live with bipolar worldwide.
‘Most people are walking around with personal digital devices like smartphones and smartwatches that capture day-to-day data that could inform psychiatric treatment. Our goal was to use the data to identify when study participants diagnosed with bipolar disorder were experiencing mood episodes,’ said Jessica Lipschitz, PhD, co-author of the study. ‘In the future, our hope is that machine learning algorithms like ours could help patients’ treatment teams respond fast to new or unremitting episodes in order to limit negative impact.’
To conduct the research Jessica and her team applied a new algorithm to personal devices such as smartphones, fitness trackers and smartwatches so they were able to detect symptoms of depression and mania.
Overall, those looking for signs of depression were found to be 80.1% accurate and those looking for mania were 89.1%.
Concluding the study, researchers said: ‘Overall, results move the field a step toward personalised algorithms suitable for the full population of patients, rather than only those with high compliance, access to specialised devices, or willingness to share invasive data.’
Moving forward, the team have remarked that their next step involves applying predicative algorithms in routine care where they can be used to improve bipolar disorder treatment. Likewise, researchers are also working on extending this work to major depressive disorder.
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