What Your Phone Knows Could Help Scientists Understand Your Health

“Stanford scientists have released an open-source platform that lets health researchers study the “screenome” – the digital traces of our daily lives – while protecting participants’ privacy.

Numerous sensors allow smartphones to silently witness everything we do, says Ian Kim, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at Stanford University. They count each smartphone owner’s steps, measure their sleep, record where they are, log their every tap, swipe and scroll, recognize their faces, and capture screenshots of what they’re looking at as they go about their lives.

Collectively, these digital traces constitute an individual’s “screenome” – a term coined by Kim’s advisor, Nilam Ram, a professor of communication and of psychology at Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences.

Now, Kim, Ram, and their colleagues have released Stanford Screenomics, an open-source Android-based platform that allows health researchers to collect screenome data at scale while preserving study participants’ privacy.

As described in a recent Nature Health paper, the team hopes that knowing what people see and do on their phones will yield insights into how the digital world intersects with, reflects, and influences their physical and mental health.

Until now, using digital trace data raised technical and privacy challenges that required researchers to have access to software engineering and infrastructure expertise, Kim says. By releasing a comprehensive, turnkey open-source platform, the team hopes to help health researchers more easily explore a range of useful questions about how we shape and are shaped by our digital environments, and consider the possibility of delivering time- and context-specific interventions.

“We want to understand people’s digital lives and help them negotiate their way through these environments in beneficial ways,” Ram says.” Complete Article.