Relevance of Objective Measures in Psychiatric Disorders—Rest-Activity Rhythm and Psychophysiological Measures

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: We present a review of recent methods of objective measurement in psychiatry and psychology with a focus on home monitoring and its utility in guiding treatment. RECENT FINDINGS: For individualized diagnostics and treatment of insomnia, actigraphy can generate clinically useful graphical presentations of sleep timing and patterns. Psychophysiological measures may complement psychometrics by tracking parallel changes in physiological responses and emotional functioning, especially during therapy for trauma symptoms and emotion regulation. It seems that rather than defining universal cut-offs, an individualised range of variability could characterize treatment response. SUMMARY: Wearable actigraphy and psychophysiological sensors are promising devices to provide biofeedback and guide treatment. Use of feasible and reliable technology during experimental and clinical procedures may necessitate defining healthy and abnormal responses in different populations and pathological states. We present a “call for action” towards further collaborative work to enable large scale use of objective measures.