Digital footprints: facilitating large-scale environmental psychiatric research in naturalistic settings through data from everyday technologies
Open accessAbstract
Digital footprints, the automatically accumulated by-products of our technology-saturated lives, offer an exciting opportunity for psychiatric research. The commercial sector has already embraced the electronic trails of customers as an enabling tool for guiding consumer behaviour, and analogous efforts are ongoing to monitor and improve the mental health of psychiatric patients. The untargeted collection of digital footprints that may or may not be health orientated comprises a large untapped information resource for epidemiological scale research into psychiatric disorders. Real-time monitoring of mood, sleep and physical and social activity in a substantial portion of the affected population in a naturalistic setting is unprecedented in psychiatry. We propose that digital footprints can provide these measurements from real world setting unobtrusively and in a longitudinal fashion. In this perspective article, we outline the concept of digital footprints and the services and devices that create them, and present examples where digital footprints have been successfully used in research. We then critically discuss the opportunities and fundamental challenges associated digital footprints in psychiatric research, such as collecting data from different sources, analysis, ethical and research design challenges.
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Data is typically captured from social media platforms without the consent or awareness of users.
“For instance, data is typically captured from social media platforms without the consent or awareness of users (Bidargaddi et al., 2017), which is especially crucial when the data relates to a socially stigmatizing health condition such as mental illness (Guntuku, Yaden, Kern, Ungar, & Eichstaedt, 2017).”
From Social Media and Mental Health: Benefits, Risks, and Opportunities for Research and Practice (2020) · cites this paper as Bidargaddi et al., 2017
In “What are digital footprints?” (page unavailable), the paper identifies social-media activity as a source of passively generated data. “Ethical challenges” says commercial data were not purposely collected with prior consent for mental-health use, and “Data collection from different sources” says users often have little understanding or control of their digital footprints. It does not establish that social-media data are typically captured without users’ consent or awareness; lack of consent for mental-health use is narrower than lack of consent to collection. (LLM, conf=0.83)
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- Authors
- Bidargaddi, N., Musiat, P., Makinen, V.-P., Ermes, M., Schrader, G., & Licinio, J.
- Affiliations
- Flinders University (AU)
- South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (AU)
- Corresponding author
- Bidargaddi, N
- Venue
- Molecular Psychiatry
- Published
- 2016-12-06
- Volume
- 22
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 164-169
- ISSN
- 1359-4184 (ISSN-L)
- 1476-5578
- PMC
- PMC5285463
- OpenAlex
- W2560433743
- Cited by
- 60
- References
- 35
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 11 · 2019: 12 · 2018: 4 · 2017: 6
- FWCI
- 10.44
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Molecular Psychiatry (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Mental Health Research Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Applied Psychology › Digital Mental Health Interventions
- Social Sciences › Transportation › Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis
- Keywords
- digital footprint, psychiatric epidemiology, everyday technology, non-intrusive monitoring, mood tracking, sleep monitoring, physical activity, social activity, longitudinal data collection, real-world data, data integration, research ethics, customer data
- MeSH terms
- Mental Disorders, Humans, Mental Health, Psychotherapy, Electronic Health Records
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