Cited by 62Digital Mental Health InterventionsMental Health Research TopicsEmotion and Mood Recognition

The promise of digital mood tracking technologies: are we heading on the right track?

Open access
Malhi, Gin S, Hamilton, Amber, Morris, Grace, Mannie, Zola, Das, Pritha, Outhred, Tim·2017·Evidence Based Mental Health

Abstract

The growing understanding that mood disorders are dynamic in nature and fluctuate over variable epochs of time has compelled researchers to develop innovative methods of monitoring mood. Technological advancement now allows for the detection of minute-to-minute changes while also capturing a longitudinal perspective of an individual’s illness. Traditionally, assessments of mood have been conducted by means of clinical interviews and paper surveys. However, these methods are often inaccurate due to recall bias and compliance issues, and are limited in their capacity to collect and process data over long periods of time. The increased capability, availability and affordability of digital technologies in recent decades has offered a novel, non-invasive alternative to monitoring mood and emotion in daily life. This paper reviews the emerging literature addressing the use of digital mood tracking technologies, primarily focusing on the strengths and inherent limitations of using these new methods including electronic self-report, behavioural data collection and wearable physiological biosensors. This developing field holds great promise in generating novel insights into the mechanistic processes of mood disorders and improving personalised clinical care. However, further research is needed to validate many of these novel approaches to ensure that these devices are indeed achieving their purpose of capturing changes in mood.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1136/eb-2017-102757

Cites

40 of 40 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

1 of the 41 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 4

  1. hopkins Cs, Ratley RJ, Benincasa DS, eds. Evaluation of voice stress analysis technology. System Sciences, 2005 HICSS'05 Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on. IEEE, 2005.
  2. Chang K-h, Fisher D, Canny J, eds. How's my mood and stress?: an efficient speech analysis library for unobtrusive monitoring on mobile phones. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Body Area Networks. ICST (Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering), 2011.
  3. Muaremi A, Gravenhorst F, Grünerbl A, eds. Assessing bipolar episodes using speech cues derived from phone calls. International Symposium on Pervasive Computing Paradigms for Mental Health. Springer, 2014. copyright. on August 18, 2023 by guest. Protected by http://mentalhealth.bmj.com/ Evid Based Mental Health: first published as 10.1136/eb-2017-102757 on 30 August 2017. Downloaded from Clinical review
  4. Zhang M, Mohr D, Meng J. Helping universities combat depression with mobile technology [Internet]. The Conversation 2017 http:// theconversation. com/ helping-universities-combat-depression-with-mobile-technology-67033 (cited 27 July 2017). copyright. on August 18, 2023 by guest. Protected by http://mentalhealth.bmj.com/ Evid Based Mental Health: first published as 10.1136/eb-2017-102757 on 30 August 2017. Downloaded from

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Malhi, G. S., Hamilton, A., Morris, G., Mannie, Z., Das, P., & Outhred, T.
Affiliations
The University of Sydney (AU)
Corresponding author
Malhi, Gin S
Venue
Evidence Based Mental Health
Publisher
BMJ
Published
2017-08-30
Volume
20
Issue
4
Pages
102-107
ISSN
  • 1362-0347 (ISSN-L)
  • 1468-960X
OpenAlex
W2752663532
Cited by
62
References
41
Citations by year
2026: 5 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 9 · 2020: 10 · 2019: 8 · 2018: 2 · 2017: 1
FWCI
0.67
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Evidence-Based Mental Health (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • HighWire Press Open Archive (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Applied Psychology › Digital Mental Health Interventions
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Mental Health Research Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Emotion and Mood Recognition
Keywords
mood disorders, mood fluctuations, wearable biosensors, recall bias
MeSH terms
Bipolar Disorder, Humans, Monitoring, Physiologic, Telemedicine, Mood Disorders, Mobile Applications

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review