Suicide rates have nudged upward in the United States in the past decade, but the rise among young people has been especially sharp. "Kids are killing themselves in record numbers, and what we've traditionally tried to do isn't working," he says. But Auerbach, who has interviewed thousands of teenagers to gauge their suicide risk and laid plans to try to keep them safe, has a response. Randy Auerbach, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University and a MAPS coinvestigator, is used to hearing that the study sounds like an invasion of privacy. I'm always just saying, ‘running late.'" Allen's 18-year-old daughter, in contrast, "uses her phone to conduct all the most important and intimate and personally involving aspects of her life." By monitoring that digital appendage, researchers hope to identify clues that foreshadow a crisis. "If you looked at my phone, what you'd find out is that I run late a lot. For adolescents, whose social and emotional lives are tightly bound to their phones, the approach could be especially powerful, says MAPS co-investigator Nicholas Allen, a clinical psychologist at the University of Oregon in Eugene.
The goal is to combine machine learning with decades of evidence about what may trigger suicidal behavior to create an algorithm that detects spikes in risk.
The study they're part of, Mobile Assessment for the Prediction of Suicide (MAPS), is one of several fledgling efforts to test whether streams of information from mobile devices can help answer a question that has long confounded scientists and clinicians: How do you predict when someone is at imminent risk of attempting suicide? All have been diagnosed with a mental illness such as depression. Most of these young people have recently attempted suicide or are having suicidal thoughts. For 6 months, an app will gobble up nearly every data point their phones can offer, capturing detail and nuance that a doctor's questionnaire cannot: their text messages and social media posts, their tone of voice in phone calls and facial expression in selfies, the music they stream, how much they move around, how much time they spend at home. They have agreed, with their parents' support, to something that would make many adolescents cringe: an around-the-clock recording of their digital lives. The 13- to 18-year-olds tap their responses, which are fed to a secure server. Its questions are blunt: "In the past week, how often have you thought of killing yourself?" "Did you make a plan to kill yourself?" "Did you make an attempt to kill yourself?" Every Wednesday afternoon, an alert flashes on the cellphones of about 50 teenagers in New York and Pennsylvania.
0 kommentar(er)
