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Journal Article

Social Sensing: Assessing Social Functioning of Patients Living with Schizophrenia using Mobile Phone Sensing

Abstract

Impaired social functioning is a symptom of mental illness (e.g., depression, schizophrenia) and a wide range of other conditions (e.g., cognitive decline in the elderly, dementia). Today, assessing social functioning relies on subjective evaluations and self assessments. We propose a different approach and collect detailed social functioning measures and objective mobile sensing data from N=55 outpatients living with schizophrenia to study new methods of passively accessing social functioning. We identify a number of behavioral patterns from sensing data, and discuss important correlations between social function sub-scales and mobile sensing features. We show we can accurately predict the social functioning of outpatients in our study including the following sub-scales: prosocial activities (MAE = 7.79, r = 0.53), which indicates engagement in common social activities; interpersonal behavior (MAE = 3.39, r = 0.57), which represents the number of friends and quality of communications; and employment/occupation (MAE = 2.17, r = 0.62), which relates to engagement in productive employment or a structured program of daily activity. Our work on automatically inferring social functioning opens the way to new forms of assessment and intervention across a number of areas including mental health and aging in place.

Author(s)
Weichen Wang
Shayan Mirjafari
Gabriella M. Harari
Dror Ben-Zeev
Rachel Brian
Tanzeem Choudhury
Marta Hauser
John Kane
Kizito Masaba
Subigya Nepal
Akane Sano
Emily A. Scherer
Vincent W.S. Tseng
Rui Wang
Hongyi Wen
Jialing Wu
Andrew T. Campbell
Journal Name
CHI '20: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Publication Date
April 21, 2020
DOI
10.1145/3313831.3376855