For the first time, a new patent application has been filed by Google-owned Fitbit, the maker of wearable devices. The new technology can analyse and detect people’s mental health based on physiological data. In the smart wearables market, Fitbit is one of the biggest names. They have a lot of fitness trackers. The company was launched in 2007 and was acquired by Google.
Often, people don’t pay enough attention to their mental health. Fitbit’s new initiative could help people deal with mental health problems before they get worse. According to the patent filing, Fitbit devices could be used to check on people’s mental well-being in a number of ways. Some of these may be more practical than others.
Predicting a wearer’s mental health will be possible thanks to Fitbit’s latest patent, which incorporates activity data, gamification, and possibly voice analysis. According to the document, the company intends to focus first on treating depression and bipolar disorder before extending to other areas of mental health. Mental health analysis will be aided by resting heart rate and sleep data. If you’re already using Fitbit’s Stress Management feature, you should know that these are already there. It’s not clear how the company will use that data to figure out how someone’s mental health is going to be.
The document notes that it is possible that the company may employ games to measure the mental health of its customers as well as physiological data. In the past, specially-designed video games have been used to test people’s cognitive abilities and psychological states. It’s not yet clear how that will work in this case, though. A few of the sketches appear to show Fitbit wearables running games, which may give an indication of how important this notion is to the company.
If the wearables have a microphone built in, the technology could look at the voice of a person and see how they are feeling, the document says. Filing into private phone calls with a smartwatch or fitness tracker sounds like a bad idea. According to the document, the content of text messages and emails can be studied for patterns that can be used to determine a person’s mental state. Most people could find this a step too far, so we’ll have to wait and see whether this makes it into a retail product.
