Scientists have created an application that can assess your mental health. And this is not good news
A vision of the world straight from the "Minority Report" has just become a bit more likely. The resulting app is able to assess your mental health.
A team of scientists from the University of Dallhousie in Canada has just completed the first phase of testing the unusual application. PROSIT can be a gift and an invaluable help for professionals in a world where depression and panic attacks are becoming almost as common as flu. However, it can also be the germ of something much more disturbing.
How does PROSIT work?
In a nutshell – the PROSIT application assesses the state of mental health based on the user’s behavior on his smartphone. The first phase of testing began in February with 300 volunteers, including more than half with diagnosed psychological problems.
After just a few months of testing, scientists from Nova Scotia confirm that the application works. By using the application you can significantly assess when a person falls into depression or anxiety.
To determine this, PROSIT checks everything. From what we view on social media, through what applications we use, to calls made and messages sent. The application can even assess how quickly and with what power we press the virtual keys, which allows you to determine the level of stress or nervousness.
Participants participating in the pilot project were also asked to submit a weekly report consisting of answering a few questions and recording a 90-second film with the story of the most exciting event of the last week. This helped scientists set a benchmark and correlate application data with information from users.
Health and privacy cannot be reconciled.
As you can easily guess from the very type of information that PROSIT collects, the application basically needs full access to the content of the phone and its functions.
On the official website of the project, scientists list the list of elements that PROSIT uses, and on it:
- accelerometer
- apps
- battery
- bluetooth
- call list
- message list
- gyroscope
- information about application installations
- screen backlight
- location
- magnetometer
- proximity sensor
- Wi-Fi
- and a lot more
"And much more" lets you think that PROSIT is gaining access to almost the full set of functions of our phone.
Researchers at the University of Dallhousie ensure that they take privacy very seriously and the application has been designed from start to finish to protect sensitive data. In addition, each user of the application must sign a number of approvals, so the application does not collect any data without his knowledge.
The developers of the application also say that although it collects information about sent messages, it does not provide information about what we send and to whom, but rather how often we call or write.
The team working on PROSIT explains in an interview for CBC that the application is by no means a substitute for a psychologist’s help, but rather a supportive tool. Data from the application can also allow psychologists to see a broader view of the patient’s health situation, analyzing his actual behavior, and not just a verbal description of this behavior.
Of course, PROSIT’s goal is noble and praiseworthy. The state of mental health of our civilization is tragic, and the spread of the Internet and social media has further aggravated this state of affairs, affecting especially vulnerable young minds. It is no wonder then that the alarming scientists are doubling and tripling to find a way not only to treat disorders, but also to counteract them.
However, the implications of this use of the application can be very far-reaching.
Pop culture has already shown us what a preventive mental health assessment can potentially lead to.
In the ‘Minority Report’, a film based on a story by Philip K. Dick, based on precognition, people who had not committed a crime but intended to do so were punished.
The potential consequences are even better illustrated by the anime Psycho-Pass, in which the Sybil computer system permanently analyzes the stress and crime propensity rate of citizens, and even based on their behavior assesses their predispositions, suggests a career path, and of course – suggests detention by services, if the title "psycho pass", or stress indicator, exceeds the permissible norm.
Of course, there is a very, very long way from pilot application tests to dystopian visions. Nevertheless, knowing these dystopian visions of pop culture, it’s hard not to notice how disturbing the very fact that an application capable of assessing our psyche so thoroughly was created and … works.
And the fact that PROSIT works can be an incentive for such applications to be created by governments or organizations that benefit financially from them.
It is easy to imagine a world in which the insurer refuses to pay benefits, because the application assessed that, for example, he drove the car under the influence of excessive stress.
It is even easier to imagine China, which already has an alarming number of futuristic solutions to surveillance citizens and use them on a massive scale. Wouldn’t an application like PROSIT be a perfect complement to the social trust system that is already used there today? I would be amazed if a similar program was not created in the Middle Kingdom anymore.
Fortunately, this scenario is still far away. However, PROSIT showed one more thing – for full diagnosis of our mental health it is necessary (at least for now) to voluntarily give up privacy. Will we have to make such a compromise in a permanently stressed society not to go crazy?
Scientists have created an application that can assess your mental health. And this is not good news
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