Mobile Phones To Detect Adolescent Depression

“The Murdoch Children’s Research Institute is trialling a Java-based mobile application that helps with early warning-sign detection and monitoring of adolescent depression…” The application is a research tool rather than a general monitoring system, and is put on mobile phones because it allows teenagers to respond to survey questions several times a day, giving a better idea of the situation. I don’t think it would work to actually detect and monitor depression in the general population, since answering questions several times a day would get very annoying (and therefore not done) without a strong reason to do so. The kids in the focus group were given a smartphone with the application preloaded, which is probably reason enough to take part…

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