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The Relationship Between Smartphone-Recorded Environmental Audio and Symptomatology of Anxiety and Depression: Exploratory Study

BACKGROUND: Objective and continuous severity measures of anxiety and depression are highly valuable and would have many applications in psychiatry and psychology. A collective source of data for objective measures are the sensors in a person’s smartphone, and a particularly rich source is the micro...

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Autores principales: Di Matteo, Daniel, Fotinos, Kathryn, Lokuge, Sachinthya, Yu, Julia, Sternat, Tia, Katzman, Martin A, Rose, Jonathan
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: JMIR Publications 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7453326/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32788153
http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/18751
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author Di Matteo, Daniel
Fotinos, Kathryn
Lokuge, Sachinthya
Yu, Julia
Sternat, Tia
Katzman, Martin A
Rose, Jonathan
author_facet Di Matteo, Daniel
Fotinos, Kathryn
Lokuge, Sachinthya
Yu, Julia
Sternat, Tia
Katzman, Martin A
Rose, Jonathan
author_sort Di Matteo, Daniel
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Objective and continuous severity measures of anxiety and depression are highly valuable and would have many applications in psychiatry and psychology. A collective source of data for objective measures are the sensors in a person’s smartphone, and a particularly rich source is the microphone that can be used to sample the audio environment. This may give broad insight into activity, sleep, and social interaction, which may be associated with quality of life and severity of anxiety and depression. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to explore the properties of passively recorded environmental audio from a subject’s smartphone to find potential correlates of symptom severity of social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, depression, and general impairment. METHODS: An Android app was designed, together with a centralized server system, to collect periodic measurements of the volume of sounds in the environment and to detect the presence or absence of English-speaking voices. Subjects were recruited into a 2-week observational study during which the app was run on their personal smartphone to collect audio data. Subjects also completed self-report severity measures of social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, depression, and functional impairment. Participants were 112 Canadian adults from a nonclinical population. High-level features were extracted from the environmental audio of 84 participants with sufficient data, and correlations were measured between the 4 audio features and the 4 self-report measures. RESULTS: The regularity in daily patterns of activity and inactivity inferred from the environmental audio volume was correlated with the severity of depression (r=−0.37; P<.001). A measure of sleep disturbance inferred from the environmental audio volume was also correlated with the severity of depression (r=0.23; P=.03). A proxy measure of social interaction based on the detection of speaking voices in the environmental audio was correlated with depression (r=−0.37; P<.001) and functional impairment (r=−0.29; P=.01). None of the 4 environmental audio-based features tested showed significant correlations with the measures of generalized anxiety or social anxiety. CONCLUSIONS: In this study group, the environmental audio was shown to contain signals that were associated with the severity of depression and functional impairment. Associations with the severity of social anxiety disorder and generalized anxiety disorder were much weaker in comparison and not statistically significant at the 5% significance level. This work also confirmed previous work showing that the presence of voices is associated with depression. Furthermore, this study suggests that sparsely sampled audio volume could provide potentially relevant insight into subjects’ mental health.
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spelling pubmed-74533262020-08-31 The Relationship Between Smartphone-Recorded Environmental Audio and Symptomatology of Anxiety and Depression: Exploratory Study Di Matteo, Daniel Fotinos, Kathryn Lokuge, Sachinthya Yu, Julia Sternat, Tia Katzman, Martin A Rose, Jonathan JMIR Form Res Original Paper BACKGROUND: Objective and continuous severity measures of anxiety and depression are highly valuable and would have many applications in psychiatry and psychology. A collective source of data for objective measures are the sensors in a person’s smartphone, and a particularly rich source is the microphone that can be used to sample the audio environment. This may give broad insight into activity, sleep, and social interaction, which may be associated with quality of life and severity of anxiety and depression. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to explore the properties of passively recorded environmental audio from a subject’s smartphone to find potential correlates of symptom severity of social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, depression, and general impairment. METHODS: An Android app was designed, together with a centralized server system, to collect periodic measurements of the volume of sounds in the environment and to detect the presence or absence of English-speaking voices. Subjects were recruited into a 2-week observational study during which the app was run on their personal smartphone to collect audio data. Subjects also completed self-report severity measures of social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, depression, and functional impairment. Participants were 112 Canadian adults from a nonclinical population. High-level features were extracted from the environmental audio of 84 participants with sufficient data, and correlations were measured between the 4 audio features and the 4 self-report measures. RESULTS: The regularity in daily patterns of activity and inactivity inferred from the environmental audio volume was correlated with the severity of depression (r=−0.37; P<.001). A measure of sleep disturbance inferred from the environmental audio volume was also correlated with the severity of depression (r=0.23; P=.03). A proxy measure of social interaction based on the detection of speaking voices in the environmental audio was correlated with depression (r=−0.37; P<.001) and functional impairment (r=−0.29; P=.01). None of the 4 environmental audio-based features tested showed significant correlations with the measures of generalized anxiety or social anxiety. CONCLUSIONS: In this study group, the environmental audio was shown to contain signals that were associated with the severity of depression and functional impairment. Associations with the severity of social anxiety disorder and generalized anxiety disorder were much weaker in comparison and not statistically significant at the 5% significance level. This work also confirmed previous work showing that the presence of voices is associated with depression. Furthermore, this study suggests that sparsely sampled audio volume could provide potentially relevant insight into subjects’ mental health. JMIR Publications 2020-08-13 /pmc/articles/PMC7453326/ /pubmed/32788153 http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/18751 Text en ©Daniel Di Matteo, Kathryn Fotinos, Sachinthya Lokuge, Julia Yu, Tia Sternat, Martin A Katzman, Jonathan Rose. Originally published in JMIR Formative Research (http://formative.jmir.org), 13.08.2020. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in JMIR Formative Research, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://formative.jmir.org, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.
spellingShingle Original Paper
Di Matteo, Daniel
Fotinos, Kathryn
Lokuge, Sachinthya
Yu, Julia
Sternat, Tia
Katzman, Martin A
Rose, Jonathan
The Relationship Between Smartphone-Recorded Environmental Audio and Symptomatology of Anxiety and Depression: Exploratory Study
title The Relationship Between Smartphone-Recorded Environmental Audio and Symptomatology of Anxiety and Depression: Exploratory Study
title_full The Relationship Between Smartphone-Recorded Environmental Audio and Symptomatology of Anxiety and Depression: Exploratory Study
title_fullStr The Relationship Between Smartphone-Recorded Environmental Audio and Symptomatology of Anxiety and Depression: Exploratory Study
title_full_unstemmed The Relationship Between Smartphone-Recorded Environmental Audio and Symptomatology of Anxiety and Depression: Exploratory Study
title_short The Relationship Between Smartphone-Recorded Environmental Audio and Symptomatology of Anxiety and Depression: Exploratory Study
title_sort relationship between smartphone-recorded environmental audio and symptomatology of anxiety and depression: exploratory study
topic Original Paper
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7453326/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32788153
http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/18751
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