By John Carpenter

Blue Sky Reporter

Your smartphone knows if you are depressed.

So say researchers at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, citing their preliminary study of phone-use data that tracked location and time spent on the phone.

Depressed people spend far more time on their smartphones and spend most of their time at home or at fewer locations than people who aren’t depressed, they found.

All this data easily can be collected by the phones themselves, and it can be used to help researchers studying depression, doctors treating it and patients suffering from it, said Sohrob Saeb, a Feinberg computer scientist and lead author of the study.

To read the rest of this story, published in the Chicago Tribune July 15, 2015, click here.