EARS (Effortless Assessment of Risk States)

Developments in consumer mobile and wearable computing (e.g., smart phones and fitness trackers) provide a historically novel opportunity to capture individual digital phenotypes (i.e., Jain, Powers, Hawkins, & Brownstein, 2015; Onnela & Rauch, 2016), which are continuously indexed, temporally rich individual-level data at multiple levels of analysis (i.e., voice tone, text message affective content, geolocation, physical mobility, autonomic activity, sleep, and social networks). Our lab has developed a suite of programs, the Effortless Assessment of Risk States (EARS) tool (Lind et al., 2018, JMIR:MH), that integrates these data into a background application on Android and iOS smartphone devices. The EARS tool collects data on language, facial expression, and voice tone along with many other signals as part of the person’s normal daily phone use. This data is then encrypted on the phone and pushed to a HIPAA compliant cloud service for automated analysis of affective states.
Based on these developments, in August 2016 our lab was selected to take part in a technology development “sprint” as part of the Opportunity Project, an Obama White House sponsored initiative to create new open digital tools to help communities. During this sprint, we worked on integrating our tool with location based data from open government data bases (e.g., location of nearest mental health services) that could be used in both assessment and intervention. As a result of this. in October 2016, we were invited to the White House to present The EARS tool.