Journal: Digital Biomarkers - Manuscript Submission Deadline: Closed
This article collection of the journal Digital Biomarkers, focused on mental health technologies, provides a venue for publishing advances in digital biomarkers and phenotypes for mental health. Papers that describe the development, validation, and deployment of theory-driven technologies in digital mental healthcare are encouraged.
Digital biomarkers and phenotypes are emerging as powerful tools for quantifying human health. These approaches, which leverage advances in wearable sensors, mobile technology, and data analytics, enable the discovery of new markers of disease that are well suited for capture and monitoring at a scale. Digital biomarkers and phenotypes may be most impactful for mental health conditions, where there is a relative paucity of established objective biomarkers, and the ability to capture measures of disease outside of traditional research or clinical contexts is truly enabling. Conditions where these biomarkers may have the most impact have been identified, with initial focus directed to conditions where symptoms cannot be reported reliably, for episodic conditions, and for conditions with rapidly changing and/or context-dependent symptoms.
Past efforts in digital mental healthcare have focused on delivering traditional in-person assessment and interventions accessibly such as web- or phone-based talk therapy and/or telehealth video-consulting. While making great gains in service accessibility, these efforts inherently carry similar limitations to in-person interventions, such as poor user engagement and requirement for reliable reporting and trained clinicians. Digital biomarkers and phenotypes for mental health conditions could diminish these limitations, offering new tools to detect, monitor, and give feedback on mental health symptoms to users and their providers alike. Importantly, there is a distinct lack of rigorous validation of digital mental health tools. Thus, there is a critical and unmet need for validated digital biomarkers and phenotypes that enable objective and remote mental health assessments across the lifespan. Researchers from groups throughout the world are working to address this critical unmet need.
Please select the option “Call for Papers: The State of Digital Biomarkers and Mental Health” when submitting your manuscript and mention this Call for Papers in your cover letter.
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