The relationship between smartphone-recorded environmental audio and symptomatology of anxiety and depression: Exploratory study

Abstract

Background: Objective and continuous severity measures of anxiety and depression are highly valuable and would have many applications in psychiatry and psychology. A collective source of data for objective measures are the sensors in a person's smartphone, and a particularly rich source is the microphone that can be used to sample the audio environment. This may give broad insight into activity, sleep, and social interaction, which may be associated with quality of life and severity of anxiety and depression. Objective: This study aimed to explore the properties of passively recorded environmental audio from a subject's smartphone to find potential correlates of symptom severity of social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, depression, and general impairment. Methods: An Android app was designed, together with a centralized server system, to collect periodic measurements of the volume of sounds in the environment and to detect the presence or absence of English-speaking voices. Subjects were recruited into a 2-week observational study during which the app was run on their personal smartphone to collect audio data. Subjects also completed self-report severity measures of social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, depression, and functional impairment. Participants were 112 Canadian adults from a nonclinical population. High-level features were extracted from the environmental audio of 84 participants with sufficient data, and correlations were measured between the 4 audio features and the 4 self-report measures. Results: The regularity in daily patterns of activity and inactivity inferred from the environmental audio volume was correlated with the severity of depression (r=−0.37; P