April 28, 2005
Cell phone project to understand teen depression
Cell phones may help to get inside the teen brain. If a new Australian study works out, we may have a unique insight into teenage depression. ABCnet.au reports.
Dr Sophie Reid from the Murdoch Children's Research Institute is behind this novel research.
"What we've done is design a software program that actually loads onto a young person's mobile phone," explains Dr Reid, "and with our software program we actually track the experience of mood, their expectations of stress and how they cope with stress across time, so we can actually look at the way in which depression develops in young people."
Participants in Sophie Reid's study get a $1,000 mobile phone to use for a week or two. They receive SMS messages with simple easily answered questions like Where are you? What are you doing? Has anything stressful happened? What did you do?
These questions are asked three or four times a day, and across a week to a month. Our researcher finds that her subjects generally give honest and helpful answers."
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