The article, “The Use of Mobile Assessments for Monitoring Mental Health in Youth: Umbrella Review,” published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research in 2023, addresses the critical global concern of improving mental health in youth. The authors, Laura Marciano and colleagues, highlight that a significant portion of young people worldwide, as many as 1 in 5, experience mental health problems, with this figure rising to 1 in 2 in the United States. The economic impact of these conditions is substantial, often leading to productivity losses and indirect societal costs that surpass direct healthcare expenditures. A major challenge in addressing this crisis is the limited access to psychological help, with only 25% of individuals with mental illness in the US receiving support, a number that drops to 10%-11% in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
In response to these challenges, the World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended new approaches to mental health care, including strengthening mental health support and increasing the use of self-management and self-care tools, particularly mobile devices. Mobile health (mHealth) applications are seen as a promising avenue to reduce the stigma associated with mental health issues, overcome barriers to inaccessible or unaffordable therapies (especially for minority groups), and ultimately bridge the gap between seeking help and accessing mental health resources. This is particularly relevant for young people, who are not only experiencing the highest prevalence of psychological problems but are also the heaviest smartphone users.
The authors explain that the future of mental health care is likely to rely on digital approaches that enable daily, continuous monitoring of individuals’ health both actively and passively. This concept is central to digital phenotyping, defined as the “moment-by-moment quantification of the individual-level human phenotype in situ using data from personal digital devices, in particular smartphones”. This emerging interdisciplinary field, also known as Psychoinformatics, integrates computer science and psychology to understand the human mind.
This umbrella review specifically aims to:
- Report the main characteristics of existing reviews concerning mental health and mobile approaches in young people.
- Describe two key mobile assessment methods: Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMAs) and trace data, and the mental health conditions they investigate.
- EMAs involve active user participation, where individuals answer brief questionnaires about their subjective experiences throughout the day using mobile apps. This method helps overcome retrospective recall biases, enhances ecological validity, allows for modeling of within-person changes, and enables real-time monitoring of treatment progress.
- Trace data refers to passive data collection through smartphone sensors (e.g., GPS, accelerometers, microphones, cameras) and wearable technology. This unobtrusive method continuously gathers data on physical states, behaviors, location, smartphone usage patterns, and speech, providing insights into the dynamic nature of mental health in natural environments.
- Summarize the main results of the included reviews.
- Outline the promises, limitations, and directions for future research in this area.
To achieve its objectives, the review conducted a systematic literature search across nine scientific databases, supplementing it with a hand search. The study included systematic and narrative reviews that focused on EMAs and trace data in the context of mental health for children, adolescents, and young adults. Ultimately, 30 reviews (21 systematic and 9 narrative), published between 2016 and 2022, were included in this comprehensive synthesis. The authors conclude that while EMAs and trace data represent promising tools for mental health assessment and intervention, offering reasonable alternatives to traditional methods, there are still significant disadvantages, such as a lack of theoretical frameworks and challenges in data analysis and validation.
Reference: Marciano, L., Vocaj, E., Bekalu, M. A., La Tona, A., Rocchi, G., & Viswanath, K. (2023). The Use of Mobile Assessments for Monitoring Mental Health in Youth: Umbrella Review. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 25, e45540. https://doi.org/10.2196/45540
