Automatically generated smartphone data and subjective stress in healthy individuals – a pilot study

Abstract

Background: Most people will also experience symptoms of stress at some point. Smartphone use has increased during the last decade and may be a new way of monitoring stress. Thus, it is of interest to investigate whether automatically generated smartphone data reflecting smartphone use is associated with subjective stress in healthy individuals.

Aims: to investigate whether automatically generated smartphone data (e.g. the number of outgoing sms/day) was associated with (1) smartphone-based subjectively reported perceived stress, (2) perceived stress (Cohen’s Perceived Stress Scale (PSS)) (3) functioning (Functioning Assessment Short Test (FAST)) and (4) non-clinical depressive symptoms (Hamilton Depression Rating Scale 17-items (HDRS)).

Methods: A cohort of 40 healthy blood donors used an app for daily self-assessment of stress for 16 weeks. At baseline participants filled out the PSS and were clinically evaluated using the FAST and the HDRS. The PSS assessment was repeated at the end of the study. Associations were estimated with linear mixed effect regression and linear regression models.

Results: There were no statistically significant associations between automatically generated smartphone data and perceived stress, functioning or severity of depressive symptoms, respectively (e.g. the number of outgoing text messages/day and self-assessed stress (B = 0.30, 95% CI: –0.40; 0.99, p = .40).

Conclusions: Participants presented with low levels of stress during the study. Automatically generated smartphone data was not able to catch potential subjective stress among healthy individuals in the present study. Due to the small sample and low levels of stress the results should be interpreted with caution.

Keywords:

• Stress
• smartphone
• healthy individuals

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the participants for participating in the study and the Blood bank at Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen, Denmark for their hospitality.

Disclosure statement

MFJ, HÞ and HU have no conflicts of interest. MF and JEB are co-founders and shareholders in Monsenso ApS. MV has been a consultant for Lundbeck within the last three years. LVK has been a consultant for Lundbeck within the last three years.

Notes on contributors

MFJ, HT and LVK conceived the trial and conducte the analyses. All authors have contributed to and approved the final version of the paper.

Additional information

Funding

The study was funded by the Lundbeck foundation and the A.P. Møller foundation for Icelandic students in Denmark.