Assessing the relationship between routine and schizophrenia symptoms with passively sensed measures of behavioral stability

Increased stability in one’s daily routine is associated with well-being in the general population and often a goal of behavioral interventions for people with serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia. Assessing behavioral stability has been limited in clinical research by the use of retrospective scales, which are susceptible to reporting biases and memory inaccuracies. Mobile passive sensors, which are less susceptible to these sources of error, have emerged as tools to assess behavioral patterns in a range of populations. The present study developed and examined a metric of behavioral stability from data generated by a passive sensing system carried by 61 individuals with schizophrenia for one year. This metric—the Stability Index—appeared orthogonal from existing measures drawn from passive sensors and matched the predictive performance of state-of-the-art features. Specifically, greater stability in social activity (e.g., calls and messages) were associated with lower symptoms, and greater stability in physical activity (e.g., being still) appeared associated with elevated symptoms. This study provides additional support for the predictive value of individualized over population-level data in psychiatric populations. The Stability Index offers also a promising tool for generating insights about the impact of behavioral stability in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41537-020-00123-2

There is actually an open standard for application-tier communication protocol for software that reports daily routines of a patient. It does not deal with evaluating collected data however, only transmission in a predictable format.

Sure, being busy reduces time spent on delusions and watching hallucinations. But this isn’t treatment. My mother is delusional for maybe seven years. First year or two she was unemployed, living off rent some students paid her. Since and at present she has a demanding office job, around sixty hours a week. Her delusions remain the same.