Digital Phenotyping for Mood Disorders: Methodology-Oriented Pilot Feasibility Study

Background: In the burgeoning area of clinical digital phenotyping research, there is a dearth of literature that details methodology, including the key challenges and dilemmas in developing and implementing a successful architecture for technological infrastructure, patient engagement, longitudinal study participation, and successful reporting and analysis of diverse passive and active digital data streams.

Objective: This article provides a narrative rationale for our study design in the context of the current evidence base and best practices, with an emphasis on our initial lessons learned from the implementation challenges and successes of this digital phenotyping study.

Methods: We describe the design and implementation approach for a digital phenotyping pilot feasibility study with attention to synthesizing key literature and the reasoning for pragmatic adaptations in implementing a multisite study encompassing distinct geographic and population settings. This methodology was used to recruit patients as study participants with a clinician-validated diagnostic history of unipolar depression, bipolar I disorder, or bipolar II disorder, or healthy controls in 2 geographically distinct health care systems for a longitudinal digital phenotyping study of mood disorders.

Results: We describe the feasibility of a multisite digital phenotyping pilot study for patients with mood disorders in terms of passively and actively collected phenotyping data quality and enrollment of patients. Overall data quality (assessed as the amount of sensor data obtained vs expected) was high compared to that in related studies. Results were reported on the relevant demographic features of study participants, revealing recruitment properties of age (mean subgroup age ranged from 31 years in the healthy control subgroup to 38 years in the bipolar I disorder subgroup), sex (predominance of female participants, with 7/11, 64% females in the bipolar II disorder subgroup), and smartphone operating system (iOS vs Android; iOS ranged from 7/11, 64% in the bipolar II disorder subgroup to 29/32, 91% in the healthy control subgroup). We also described implementation considerations around digital phenotyping research for mood disorders and other psychiatric conditions.

Conclusions: Digital phenotyping in affective disorders is feasible on both Android and iOS smartphones, and the resulting data quality using an open-source platform is higher than that in comparable studies. While the digital phenotyping data quality was independent of gender and race, the reported demographic features of study participants revealed important information on possible selection biases that may result from naturalistic research in this domain. We believe that the methodology described will be readily reproducible and generalizable to other study settings and patient populations given our data on deployment at 2 unique sites.