Passive and In-Situ assessment of mental and physical well-being using mobile sensors

Abstract

The idea of continuously monitoring well-being using mobile-sensing systems is gaining popularity. In-situ measurement of human behavior has the potential to overcome the short comings of gold-standard surveys that have been used for decades by the medical community. However, current sensing systems have mainly focused on tracking physical health; some have approximated aspects of mental health based on proximity measurements but have not been compared against medically accepted screening instruments. In this paper, we show the feasibility of a multi-modal mobile sensing system to simultaneously assess mental and physical health. By continuously capturing fine-grained motion and privacy-sensitive audio data, we are able to derive different metrics that reflect the results of commonly used surveys for assessing well-being by the medical community. In addition, we present a case study that highlights how errors in assessment due to the subjective nature of the responses could potentially be avoided by continuous mobile sensing.