Published July 4, 2025 at 5:00 AM EDT
Smartphones are often blamed for ruining the mental health of the people who use them.
A new study involving University of Michigan researchers is looking at ways to use smartphones to understand a patient’s trending mental health.
Whitney Ringwald is a psychology professor at the University of Minnesota. She’s the lead author of a study using a smartphone app to monitor patients' travels and phone use.
Ringwald said their app works like other smartphone apps that track users.
“Except instead of trying to sell you things,” said Ringwald, “We’re trying to understand whether there’s anything that we can understand about mental health and potentially use that information for assessment and intervention eventually."
Ringwald said the app can use the smartphone’s ability to track the physical location of patients who agree to use it. For example, the app can track if a patient with depression is spending more time isolating from others or if a patient with a substance abuse problem is frequently visiting bars.
Ringwald said one use for the app is to send messages to patients when it appears their monitored behavior is leading to a potential mental health episode.
U of M researchers helped interpret all the data collected from more than 500 participants in the Pittsburgh area.
JAMA published the study Thursday.
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