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April 2015 | Read this issue and more at www.healthandwellnessmagazine.net |
Therapist at Hand
oped a smartphone app called The
StudentLife app. It compares students’ happiness, stress, depression
and loneliness to their academic performance. Smartphone sensors assess
mental health, academic performance
and behavioral trends such as sleep
duration, duration of conversations
throughout the day, physical activity, where users went and for how
long, eating habits and stress levels.
The researchers presented their
findings at the ACM International
Joint Conference on Pervasive
and Ubiquitous Computing. The
researchers released an anonymized
version of the dataset so other social
and behavioral scientists can use
it in further studies. Expect your
future smartphone to know if you’re
depressed, stressed or lonely and then
predict your mental performance and
health.
There are plenty of other mental
health apps already available for use:
ACT is designed for service members, veterans and other people to use
in tandem with in-person treatment
of Acceptance and Commitment
Therapy (ACT) for PTSD, depression, anxiety, chronic pain and other
trauma-related mental health problems.
BioZen was developed by the
Department of Defense to help
service members have portable biofeedback.
CBT-i Coach is for individuals
receiving cognitive behavioral therapy
and those
who experience
insomnia. The
app is a structured
Need some mental health?
There’s an app for that
By Angela S. Hoover, Staff Writer
Joaquin Phoenix played a man who
fell in love with his Siri-like phone
app in the movie “Her,” but in the
real world, we could actually have a
virtual therapist when we use mental
health apps.
Researchers at the University of
Maryland have demonstrated that
certain vocal features change as a
patient’s feelings of depression worsen. When depression worsens, speech
becomes breathier and slower and
can be more rough and hoarse sounding. The researchers presented their
findings at the 168th meeting of the
Acoustical Society of America and
plan to do larger studies. In the next
studies, they will compare speech patterns of individuals with no history of
mental illness to those with depres-
sion to create an acoustic profile