Measuring depression with wearables#stress Big brother or mental health advancement? Stanford medicine is currently studying how to quantify stress, anxiety and depression. It’s true that mental health diseases are notoriously hard to objectively test for. Imagine an MD diagnosing your heart disease based on how you “feel”. For most diseases we have objective tests that can help your care team make a definitive diagnosis usually using blood, urine or stool. But that’s not been any objective tests developed yet for anxiety, depression or stress. “”One of the biggest barriers for psychiatry in the field that I work in is that we don’t have objective tests. So the way that we assess mental health conditions and risks for them is by interview and asking you how do you feel,” said Leanne Williams, MD, a professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford…”. The real breakthrough is determining how to use heart rate, skin conductance, electrolyte levels and hormone production to correlate with the production of cortisol, a known stress hormone. “Ultimately, the researchers hope MENTAID will help prevent and treat mental illness — for example, by better predicting and evaluating patient response to specific antidepressants.” The future is coming.
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