Dr. Hays is Research Assistant, Division of Digital Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts. Dr. Torous is Director, Division of Digital Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts. Dr. Farrell is Lecturer, Harvard Medical School, and Psychiatrist, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, Massachusetts.
Disclosures Mr. Hays and Dr. Farrell report no financial relationships with any companies whose products are mentioned in this article, or with manufacturers of competing products. Dr. Torous receives grant support from Otsuka.
To illustrate how digital phenotyping could be put to clinical use, we created the following case report of a fictional patient who agrees to be monitored via her smartphone.
Consider a hypothetical patient we will call Ms. T who is in her mid-20s and has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. On a follow-up visit, she says she has insomnia. She also reports having a recent loss of appetite and higher levels of anxiety. After reviewing her smartphone data (Figure 3), the clinician sees an inversely proportional relationship between her sleep quality and symptoms of anxiety, psychosis, and depression, which suggests that these symptoms might be due to poor sleep. Her step count has been fairly stable, indicating that there is no significant correlation between physical activity and her other symptoms.
