'Selfie' Social Media Helps Track Mental Health Habits In Study

Everyone likes to take a selfie now and then, but some are taking it to the next level.

Researchers at the University of Rochester have developed an innovative approach to turn any computer or smartphone with a camera into a personal mental health monitoring device.

As technology is widely used across the world to help monitor various health issues, lead study author and Professor of Computer Science Jiebo Luo explains how quietly observing behavior can help to better understand certain health problems in a less obtrusive manner.

The researchers were able to measure a user's heart rate simply by monitoring very small, subtle changes in the user's forehead color. While the system does not grab other data, it may be available through the including the user's location.

The study authors worked to analyzed the video data from an extract of a number of "clues," including heart rate, blinking rate, eye pupil radius and head rate. At the same time, the program worked to analyze what the users posted on Twitter and what they read, as well as how fast they scrolled.

However, they reiterated that not every input is treated equally. For instance, what a user tweets is given more weight than what the user reads as it's a sign of direct expression to thinking and feeling.

To calibrate the system and measure reactions, researchers enrolled 27 participants in a test group and "sent them messages, real tweets, with sentiment to induce their emotion."

This helped them gauge how subjects reacted after seeing or reading material considered to be positive or negative.

Then, they compared the outcome from all the combined monitoring with the users' self reports about their feelings to find out how well the program actually performed.

While the program currently only considers emotions as positive, neutral or negative, researchers concluded that they hope to add extra sensitivity to the program by teaching it to further define emotions such as anger or sadness.

More information regarding the findings can be seen here. 

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