Passive smartphone measures hold significant potential and are increasingly employed in psychological and biomedical research to capture an individual's behavior. These measures involve the near-continuous and unobtrusive collection of data from smartphones without requiring active input from participants. For example, GPS sensors are used to determine the (social) context of a person, and accelerometers to measure movement.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPharmacological treatment for psychiatric disorders has shown to only be effective in about one-third of patients, as it is associated with frequent treatment failure, often because of side effects, and a long process of trial-and-error pharmacotherapy until an effective and tolerable treatment is found. This notion emphasizes the urgency for a personalized medicine approach in psychiatry. This prospective patient- and rater-blinded, randomized, controlled study will investigate the effect of dose-adjustment of antidepressants and or antipsychotics and according to the latest state-of-the-art international dosing recommendations for and metabolizer status in patients with mood, anxiety, and psychotic disorders.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: In people with cognitive impairment, loss of social interactions has a major impact on well-being. Therefore, patients would benefit from early detection of symptoms of social withdrawal. Current measurement techniques such as questionnaires are subjective and rely on recall, in contradiction to smartphone apps, which measure social behavior passively and objectively.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Digital phenotyping, the measurement of human behavioral phenotypes using personal devices, is rapidly gaining popularity. Novel initiatives, ranging from software prototypes to user-ready research platforms, are innovating the field of biomedical research and health care apps. One example is the BEHAPP project, which offers a fully managed digital phenotyping platform as a service.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic has led to unprecedented societal changes limiting us in our mobility and our ability to connect with others in person. These unusual but widespread changes provide a unique opportunity for studies using digital phenotyping tools. Digital phenotyping tools, such as mobile passive monitoring platforms (MPM), provide a new perspective on human behavior and hold promise to improve human behavioral research.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe use of smartphone-based location data to quantify behavior longitudinally and passively is rapidly gaining traction in neuropsychiatric research. However, a standardized and validated preprocessing framework for deriving behavioral phenotypes from smartphone-based location data is currently lacking. Here, we present a preprocessing framework consisting of methods that are validated in the context of geospatial data.
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