Your smartphone can now do everything for you, even predict your psychological status.
Researchers at the National Institute of Health developed an app that uses “real time behavior monitoring” to predict the physiological state of its users.
The smartphone system asks users how they are doing mentally throughout the day, and based on that data can deliver an automated intervention when necessary. The smartphone app also monitors the user’s location to make these decisions.
“Continuously collected ambulatory psychological data are fused with data on location and responses to questions,” the NIH said, according to the Free Beacon. “The mobile data are combined with geospatial risk maps to quantify exposure to risk and predict a future psychological state. The future predictions are used to warn the user when he or she is at especially high risk of experiencing a negative event that might lead to an unwanted outcome (e.g., lapse to drug use in a recovering addict).”
Researchers developed the app to track the moods and cravings of drug users from a $8.9 million federal study at the NIH Baltimore campus. While the app is currently being marketed to use mainly for drug interventions, the inventors are looking to test the technology for other purposes.
The app recently appeared on a list of NIH inventions published by the Federal Register that of technologies able to be licensed to private companies, but NIH hopes to soon sell the app to the public market.
