Depression can affect people’s cognitive functioning (it can slow down mental processing, impact memory and attention). With the use of smartphones we can now assess many health markers repeatedly and remotely to monitor patients outside of the clinic, so could smartphone-based measures of cognitive functioning be used to monitor depression? That is the question we ask in our recently published study.

Our study followed 475 participants who used their smartphones to provide data on cognitive functioning and depression severity every 6 weeks for 14 months. We measured cognition in two ways:

1) Self-reports – Participants rated their own experience of cognitive functioning.

2) Performance-based tasks – Participants played 4 “mini-games” that tested attention, memory, processing speed, and attention switching.

Our results indicate that participants’ own rating of their cognitive functioning correlates strongly to their depression severity. Thus, self-reports are important to monitor their depression severity. However, performance-based tasks did not correlate so strongly with depression severity over time. This illustrates that more work is needed if we want to use more objective cognitive measures to remotely monitor depression. We can either improve the tasks themselves, change how often we take assessments, or start using passively collected data (e.g., typing speed, mistakes).

This study highlights the potential of remote cognitive assessments, but also the challenges in tracking cognition effectively. More research is needed to improve digital tools for mental healthcare. For now, asking people how they feel about their cognitive is something easily implementable in the clinic.