SAD: Social Anxiety and Depression Monitoring System for College Students

Mental health problems are highly prevalent and increasing in frequency and severity among the college student population. The upsurge in mobile and wearable wireless technologies capable of intense, longitudinal tracking of individuals, provide enormously valuable opportunities in mental health research to examine temporal patterns and dynamic interactions of key variables. In this paper, we present an integrative framework for social anxiety and depression (SAD) monitoring, two of the most common disorders in the college student population. We have developed a smartphone application and the supporting infrastructure to collect both passive sensor data and active event-driven data. This supports intense, longitudinal, dynamic tracking of anxious and depressed college students to evaluate how their emotions and social behaviors change in the college campus environment. The data will provide critical information about how student mental health problems are maintained and, ultimately, how student patterns on campus shift following treatment.