Personalized mood prediction from patterns of behavior collected with smartphones

Brunilda Balliu; Chris Douglas; Darsol Seok; Liat Shenhav; Yue Wu; Doxa Chatzopoulou; William Kaiser; Victor Chen; Jennifer Kim; Sandeep Deverasetty; Inna Arnaudova; Robert Gibbons; Eliza Congdon; Michelle G Craske; Nelson Freimer; Eran Halperin; Sriram Sankararaman; Jonathan Flint

doi:10.1038/s41746-024-01035-6

Personalized mood prediction from patterns of behavior collected with smartphones

NPJ Digit Med. 2024 Feb 28;7(1):49. doi: 10.1038/s41746-024-01035-6.

Authors

Brunilda Balliu^{1

2

3}, Chris Douglas⁴, Darsol Seok⁵, Liat Shenhav⁶, Yue Wu⁶, Doxa Chatzopoulou⁵, William Kaiser⁷, Victor Chen⁷, Jennifer Kim⁵, Sandeep Deverasetty⁵, Inna Arnaudova⁵, Robert Gibbons⁸, Eliza Congdon^{4

5}, Michelle G Craske^{4

9}, Nelson Freimer^{4

10}, Eran Halperin⁶, Sriram Sankararaman^{11

6

10}, Jonathan Flint^{12

13}

Affiliations

¹ Departments of Computational Medicine, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA. bballiu@ucla.edu.
² Departments of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA. bballiu@ucla.edu.
³ Department of Biostatistics, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA. bballiu@ucla.edu.
⁴ Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Science, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA.
⁵ Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA.
⁶ Department of Computer Science, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA.
⁷ Department of Electrical Engineering, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA.
⁸ Departments of Medicine, Public Health Sciences and Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA.
⁹ Department of Psychology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA.
¹⁰ Department of Human Genetics, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA.
¹¹ Departments of Computational Medicine, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA.
¹² Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Science, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA. JFlint@mednet.ucla.edu.
¹³ Department of Human Genetics, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA. JFlint@mednet.ucla.edu.

Abstract

Over the last ten years, there has been considerable progress in using digital behavioral phenotypes, captured passively and continuously from smartphones and wearable devices, to infer depressive mood. However, most digital phenotype studies suffer from poor replicability, often fail to detect clinically relevant events, and use measures of depression that are not validated or suitable for collecting large and longitudinal data. Here, we report high-quality longitudinal validated assessments of depressive mood from computerized adaptive testing paired with continuous digital assessments of behavior from smartphone sensors for up to 40 weeks on 183 individuals experiencing mild to severe symptoms of depression. We apply a combination of cubic spline interpolation and idiographic models to generate individualized predictions of future mood from the digital behavioral phenotypes, achieving high prediction accuracy of depression severity up to three weeks in advance (R² ≥ 80%) and a 65.7% reduction in the prediction error over a baseline model which predicts future mood based on past depression severity alone. Finally, our study verified the feasibility of obtaining high-quality longitudinal assessments of mood from a clinical population and predicting symptom severity weeks in advance using passively collected digital behavioral data. Our results indicate the possibility of expanding the repertoire of patient-specific behavioral measures to enable future psychiatric research.

Abstract

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