Show me your smartphone… and then I will show you your brain structure and brain function

Abstract

Research in the field of digital phenotyping and mobile sensing has seen a tremendous rise in interest over the last few years. The psychological and psychiatric sciences were early adopters of implementing these promising techniques into their research to better understand the human mind. The most often studied data to predict mental states and traits at the moment represent reaction-time and app usage data from multi-step human-smartphone interactions and digital footprints left from the user's interactions with social media platforms. Interestingly, research that links reaction time measurements and other digital footprints to underlying neurobiology data from magnetic resonance imaging, electroencephalography, or molecular genetics has thus far been mostly lacking. As a starting point for discussion among neuroscientists, in this article, we review the scant literature applying digital phenotyping/mobile sensing to neuroscientific research and outline the potential of this new research approach. With the ubiquity of smartphones, many of these reviewed works focus on smartphone-based-studies in the neuroscientific digital phenotyping/mobile sensing field.