Research Project
8522956
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Mental health disorders exact very high personal, social and economic costs in our country and around the world, presenting a significant public health challenge. Cogito has developed and deployed technology that listens to natural conversation and produces predictive accuracies of 70-90% with respect to various outcomes such as depression (Azarbayejani, Feast, Zhang, & Massey, 2011; Azarbayejani, Feast, & Pentland, 2010; Chu, 2009). This software tool has been recently augmented and extended to mobile telephones. Cogito's new software suite, the Mobile Sensing Platform, objectively measures behavioral indicators (including motion, communication, location, and voice) and allows patients to more easily monitor their symptoms over time for depression, anxiety, and PTSD. The primary focus of this Phase I application is to develop a new tool - a dashboard - that will extend the mobile platform to researchers and clinicians, thus providing a means of readily visualizing and analyzing these complex patient behavioral data patterns. Extending Cogito's Mobile Sensing Platform to include a new clinician dashboard will enhance greatly the usability and value of the rich data streams collected via our mobile sensing software. Researchers will be able to monitor and quantify the effect of treatments on different patients in quasi-real time, at both the individual and group level. Specific aims of this Phase I proposal are to design and develop a dashboard visualization tool and to establish that the data presented to clinicians and researchers via the dashboard are valid, valuable and useful. Clinical researchers are currently faced with the difficult task of inferring patient behavior and treatment compliance between visits through self-report and historical behavior. Using passively gathered behavioral signals through a smart phone application allows for symptom assessment models to be built from actual behavior instead of reported behavior. Monitoring, analyzing, and visualizing changes in quasi-real time allow clinicians a new window into understanding patient behavior. The Cogito Mobile Sensing Platform would provide such a service, allowing for improvements in patient care through measurement of treatment efficacy, adjustments of medication, and rapid assessments of behavioral change. Cogito is currently involved in clinical trials using our platform to monitor mental illness in US military personnel. We will use this dataset to illustrate prototypical symptom clusters. These longitudinal symptom sets will form the basis for building the dashboard visualization tool. Focus groups with clinical researchers will align the data presentation and usability with the needs of practicing medical professionals.
