Dr. App: Video Selfies for Mental Health

The mobile applications They are here to stay and beyond games, management tools or business or personal promotion, some developments tend to try to improve our lives. Some of these Apps are part of what is known as mHealth, or mobile health, and are aimed at collaborating with medical departments to facilitate the Detection and treatment of some diseases.

In this blog we have already talked about this type of Apps. Recently we echoed applications designed for a first diagnosis, such as those intended for Check our view before going to the doctor's appointment. Other apps with a marked medical or health nature are those that make nexus and communication channel between patients and doctors or the Apps that monitor to a patient and send their data for further analysis and diagnosis. Among the latter is the application they are developing in the University of Rochester, USA, and whose function is to determine the mental health status of users.

Still in testing phase, this multiplatform App - suitable for mobile phones and computers - is able to determine if our mood is positive, negative or neutral based on our reactions during web or mobile browsing. To do this, it relies on a series of video images taken randomly and without warning. With these, the program analyzes the user's behavior; actions such as the time between blinking, keystrokes, messages sent, an estimate of heart rate or pupil radius. With all this, The App is capable of issuing an accurate diagnosis.

To outline this AppThe researchers involved in the project have had the collaboration of 27 people. All of them have been subjected to different tests and reaction analyses in order to calibrate the diagnoses.

Although, for the moment, the evaluations focus on three aspects: positive, negative or neutral attitude, the researchers have already started the second phase of evolution of this App. The goal is to be able to give an accurate diagnosis, even specifying mental pathologies based on the video selfies taken by the App. If this is achieved, and although it should never be taken as the only medical element, the progress in the field of early diagnosisz would be spectacular. It would be another story if this App was left only for analyze the reactions of users of a particular product in order to determine its future market acceptance, a type of test for which many companies would pay large sums of money.