Automatic Detection of Social Rhythms in Bipolar Disorder via Smartphone

Objective To evaluate the feasibility of automatically assessing the Social Rhythm Metric (SRM), a clinically-validated marker of stability and rhythmicity for individuals with bipolar disorder (BD), using passively-sensed data from smartphones. Methods Seven patients with BD used smartphones for 4 weeks passively collecting sensor data including accelerometer, microphone, location, and communication information to infer behavioral and contextual patterns. Participants also completed SRM entries using a smartphone app. Results We found that automated sensing can be used to infer the SRM score. Using location, distance traveled, conversation frequency, and non-stationary duration as inputs, our generalized model achieves root-mean-square-error of 1.40, a reasonable performance given the range of SRM score (0-7). Personalized models further improve performance with mean root-mean-square-error of 0.92 across users. Classifiers using sensor streams can predict stable (SRM score >= 3.5) and unstable (SRM score <3.5) states with high accuracy (precision: 0.85 and recall: 0.86). Conclusions Automatic smartphone sensing is a feasible approach for inferring rhythmicity, a key marker of wellbeing for individuals with BD.