Smartphones help track health by monitoring sleep, steps, and heart rate, but also reveal mental health issues through behavior patterns like staying home more and irregular sleep.
United States: Smartphones may cause more people to get healthy, because they track their sleep, steps, and heart rate, but also expose mental health-related problems, new research reveals.
A study published by researchers from the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Pittsburgh in JAMA Network Open utilized smartphone sensors as silent observers of everyday life.
More about the news
These digital footprints followed our basic activities: how much we move, sleep, or look at our phones, as well as randomly gave away clues into the aspects of our psychological well-being, appearing in the form of our daily routines, as medicalxpress.com
Through their research, the researchers discovered that the various mental disorders are more or less the same in behavior, such as being at home more, sleeping late, and not charging phones frequently.
Smartphones can help people stay healthy by monitoring their sleep, steps and heart rate, but they also can help reveal issues tied to mental health, new research by @UMich shows. https://t.co/opgGaHiNMg pic.twitter.com/N79bf3JDyK
— Michigan Research (@UMichResearch) July 15, 2025
These actions can represent the degree of something known as the p-factor, which connects many of the mental health problems.
Aidan Wright, professor of psychology and the Phil F. Jenkins Research Professor of Depression, at the University of Michigan was the person, at the University of Michigan, who said that the group arrived at the result that certain actions such as reduced phone calls or affecting less distance per walk corresponded with certain maladies such as less social or sick.
According to Wright, who is the study’s senior author, “These findings suggest that major forms of mental illness are detectable from smartphone sensors, indicating that this technology could potentially be used for symptom monitoring and research on wide-ranging psychiatric problems,” medicalxpress.com reported.
It is one of the biggest studies of its kind, with the data gathered in 2023 in smartphone sensors carried by 557 adults during 15 days.
Though using phone sensors and wearables to diagnose and track mental illness shows a lot of enthusiasm, advancement is not much, Wright said.
“This is, in part, because most digital psychiatry work has not used what we know about how mental illness is organized within people when selecting targets to predict and monitor,” as the expert noted.
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5, diagnoses have been used in digital psychiatry, but they form ill-defined targets to be detected and monitored since they are heterogeneous.
That is, they are groupings of various combinations of symptoms that can possibly have different behavioral signatures and also share with many other diagnoses one or more symptoms, Wright said.