Student Perspectives on Digital Phenotyping: The Acceptability of Using Smartphone Data to Assess Mental Health

Rooksby, John, Morrison, Alistair and Murray-Rust, Dave (2019) Student Perspectives on Digital Phenotyping: The Acceptability of Using Smartphone Data to Assess Mental Health. In: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Glasgow, Scotland Uk — May 04 - 09, 2019. CHI '19 . Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, p. 425. ISBN 9781450359702

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Abstract

There is a mental health crisis facing universities internationally. A growing body of interdisciplinary research has successfully demonstrated that using sensor and interaction data from students’ smartphones can give insight into stress, depression, mood, suicide risk and more. The approach, which is sometimes termed Digital Phenotyping, has potential to transform how mental health and wellbeing can be monitored and understood. The approach could also transform how interventions are designed, delivered and evaluated. To date, little work has addressed the human and ethical side of digital phenotyping, including how students feel about being monitored. In this paper we report findings from in-depth focus groups, prototyping and interviews with students. We find they are positive about mental health technology, but also that there are multi-layered issues to address if digital phenotyping is to become acceptable. Using an acceptability framework, we set out the key design challenges that need to be addressed.

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