Sensing Technologies for Monitoring Serious Mental Illnesses

Mental health is an urgent global issue. Around 450 million people suffer from serious mental illnesses worldwide, which results in devastating personal outcomes and huge societal burden. Effective symptom monitoring and personalized interventions can significantly improve mental health care across different populations. However, traditional clinical methods often fall short when it comes to real-time monitoring of symptoms. Sensing technologies can address these issues by enabling granular tracking of behavioral, physiological, and social signals relevant to mental health. In this article, we describe how sensing technologies can be used to diagnose and monitor patient states for numerous serious mental illnesses. We also identify current limitations and potential future directions. We believe that the multimedia community can build on sensing technologies to enable efficient clinical decision-making in mental health care. Specifically, innovative multimedia systems can help identify and visualize personalized early-warning signs from complex multimodal signals, which could lead to effective intervention strategies and better preemptive care.