Ghosh’s work and my taps are part of the new but rapidly developing field called digital phenotyping. It aims to take the huge amounts of raw data that can be continuously collected from people’s use of smartphones, wearables and other digital devices and analyse them using artificial intelligence (AI) to infer behaviour related to health and disease.
If symptom-related digital signals – called digital biomarkers – can be properly teased out, it could provide a new route for diagnosing or monitoring a range of medical conditions, particularly those relating to mental or brain health. Early research suggests patterns in geolocation data may correlate with episodes of depression and relapses in schizophrenia; certain keystroke patterns could predict mania in bipolar disorder; and the way toddlers gaze at a smartphone screen could be used to detect autism.
Corbyn, Z. (2021, November 7). The dawn of tappigraphy: does your smartphone know how you feel before you do? The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/nov/07/the-dawn-of-tappigraphy-does-your-smartphone-know-how-you-feel-before-you-do
Privacy issues also loom. While data gathered for academic research studies follows strict protocols, things can get murkier with data gathered by private companies. Data that includes predictive inferences made with digital phenotyping approaches can be shared by companies in ways that not everyone is aware of but that could have impacts, says Martinez–Martin. “These inferences could be of interest to employers, insurers or education providers and they could use them in ways that are detrimental,” she says. And just because data is “deidentified” – made anonymous – doesn’t mean it can’t be reidentified in some way.
And while there is protection under US law for sensitive health information, it generally relates to that collected in healthcare systems only – not by tech companies. In any case, it is unclear that established definitions of sensitive health information include the kind of information that digital phenotyping strives to collect. “The old system of protecting what we thought of as sensitive data is not really appropriate for this new digital world,” says Martinez–Martin.