Mental Health and Sensing

TL;DR

This paper reviews sensing technologies for mental health detection and treatment, emphasizing physiological, behavioral, and social signal monitoring, and discusses emerging digital intervention methods to address the global mental health crisis.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of current sensing methods and digital therapies for mental health, highlighting recent technological developments and potential for early detection and intervention.

Findings

Active and passive sensing methods can detect mental health issues.

Digital therapeutic interventions are emerging as effective treatment options.

Sensing technologies enable granular monitoring of physiological and social signals.

Abstract

Mental health is a global epidemic, affecting close to half a billion people worldwide. Chronic shortage of resources hamper detection and recovery of affected people. Effective sensing technologies can help fight the epidemic through early detection, prediction, and resulting proper treatment. Existing and novel technologies for sensing mental health state could address the aforementioned concerns by activating granular tracking of physiological, behavioral, and social signals pertaining to problems in mental health. Our paper focuses on the available methods of sensing mental health problems through direct and indirect measures. We see how active and passive sensing by technologies as well as reporting from relevant sources can contribute toward these detection methods. We also see available methods of therapeutic treatment available through digital means. We highlight a few key intervention technologies that are being developed by researchers to fight against mental illness issues.