Scientists have developed a smartphone app that can help you figure out what triggers your mood swings.
The
Emotion Sense app created by a team led by Cambridge University is
being credited with having implications for psychological therapy.
The
app uses sensors on your phone to collect information about where you
are, how active you have been and who you have been speaking to, for
example.
This data is cross-referenced with
information keyed in by the user giving an overview of their feelings
which is refined by a survey.
"Most other
attempts at software like this are coarse-grained in terms of their view
of what a feeling is," said Dr Jason Rentfrow, senior lecturer in the
university's Department of Psychology and a research team member.
"Many
just look at emotion in terms of feeling happy, sad, angry or neutral.
The aim here is to use a more flexible approach, to collect data that
shows how moods vary between people. That is something which we think is
quite unique to the system we have designed," Rentfrow said.
The designers of the app hope it will throw up a spot-on record of what provokes people's highs and lows.
"Behind
the scenes, smartphones are constantly collecting data that can turn
them into a key medical and psychological tool," team member Dr Neal
Lathia, a research associate at Cambridge University's Computer
Laboratory, said.
"Any smartphone now comes
with numerous sensors that can tell you about aspects of your life, like
how active you are, or how sociable you have been in the past 24
hours.
"In the long term, we hope to be able
to extract that data so that, for example, it can be used for
therapeutic purposes," Lathia said.
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