An app that can tell if you are depressed by analysing your phone activity.
How often you call your mother, what time you head to a bar or even how often you text your friends can all give clues to your mental and physical health.
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A new app hopes to harness this information to tell phone owners their mood - and even help them work with doctors to improve problem areas.
Called Ginger.io, the app can track how often people messaged, how long they talk for, and how far they travel, as well as monitoring sleep and exercise.
'We use your smartphone to map out your day, look at how you move around and how many other people you talk to,' the firm says.
'When something seems off, we send an alert to you and those who care about your health.'
The first commercial products focus on depression, co-morbid depression, anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia.
The firm works with doctors to give patients the app, and has partnered with Kaiser Permenente, Novant Health, and over 20 hospital systems and academic centres across the country.
In addition, they are actively pursuing research partnerships, with universities to develop the app for long terms trials, including heart disease work with UCSF.
Like providers, academic medicine is looking for better ways to understand how patient behaviors affect health outcomes,' said Dr. Anmol Madan, co-founder and CEO of Ginger.io.
'Ginger.io's smartphone app and analytics engine is essentially a new class of microscope that helps quantify and understand real-world behavior at scale, in many different disease areas.
'For our academic partners, this offers new insight about clinical characterization, and it may lead to better diagnosis and new therapeutics and interventions for these conditions.'
With those hospitals that already have patient outreach operations, Ginger.io hopes to make these programs more efficient and proactive.
The traditional method of outreach involves randomized check ins.
Co-founder and CEO Anmol Madan said often only about 20% of patients who are experiencing symptoms get a call.
Dr. Ilan Elson, Head of Research and Development at Ginger.io said: 'Our partners are either deploying Ginger.io's existing core behavioral health (i.e., mental health) programs in new and exciting ways, or they are using the Ginger.io platform on new conditions like heart disease and chronic pain.'
'We're very excited about the approach Ginger.io is taking to engage patients suffering from depression,' said Dr. Patricia Arean, Professor of Psychiatry at UCSF.
'Patient feedback on the experience has been overwhelmingly positive thus far, and we're excited to learn more about what digital interventions can do for mental health.'
Researchers at UCSF, are collaborating with Ginger.io to help patients suffering from heart disease, multiple sclerosis and post-operative recovery.
As part of the Health eHeart Study, for example, Ginger.io is helping world-class cardiologists detect early-warning signals for the development and exacerbation of heart disease.
'Heart disease is the No. 1 killer in the United States and the developing world, and identifying heart disease risks and addressing them in advance is much needed,' said Dr. Jeffrey Olgin, chief of the UCSF Division of Cardiology and a principal investigator of the Health eHeart Study.
'Our ultimate goal through this study and others is to provide a thermometer or 'check engine' light for people to be empowered in managing their own health and risk.'
Researchers at Duke University also see the potential of Ginger.io to help patients in postoperative recovery settings.
Patients undergoing joint replacement surgery use the Ginger.io app to track their recovery, pain and return to functionality.
Drs. Laura Tully, Cam Carter and Tara Niendam of UC Davis, for example, recently shared their findings from a partnership with Ginger.io in an early psychosis study.
Results announced at this year's Society for Biological Psychiatry showed the identification of specific 'smartphone signatures' and patterns of behavior for symptoms of psychosis in adolescent populations.
'This isn't science fiction,' said Dr. Elson of Ginger.io.
'We're touching a huge number of patients in a wide array of clinical settings. Working alongside our partners, we're having a real impact on population health management and improving patients' lives—in some cases almost immediately.'
' This could be a turning point in the history of healthcare delivery, and that's very exciting for us at Ginger.io.'
Credit: MailOnline
