Dive Brief:
- Dartmouth College professor Andrew Campbell is developing an app to help students monitor their mental health.
- The StudentLife smartphone application gathers sensor data — from its GPS, motion sensor, microphone, etc. — to judge the student’s level of happiness, stress, and loneliness, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports.
- Campbell was inspired to create the app partly because of his brother’s college struggles, which aren't specified.
Dive Insight:
Doctors and psychologists at Dartmouth and the University of Texas at Austin helped design a study that compared students’ behavioral data gathered by the app to their self-assessments of mental health. The study showed a significant correlation between the students’ behavioral data and their mental health and academic performance. The app calculates the student user’s stress from his or her movements, sleep, number of face-to-face conversations, and class workloads.