Remote Monitoring for Understanding Mechanisms and Prediction in Psychiatry

Technological advances offer the potential to better characterise the symptoms and mechanisms of psychiatric disorders. This review provides an overview of how remote monitoring might inform understanding of mood and anxiety disorders, and may be used by clinicians to predict clinical outcomes and treatment response. The review also discusses salient ethical issues and the field’s future directions. A range of psychological and physiological remotely-collected data have been associated with clinical symptoms and outcomes, including momentary self-report, actigraphy, geolocation and heart-rate variability. Remote monitoring has shown promise in phenotyping, predicting symptoms and clinical severity, predicting treatment response and has informed psychological models of anxiety disorders. Remote monitoring is a diverse field involving the collection of clinically relevant data in naturalistic settings. Although facing significant practical and ethical challenges, it has shown much potential in developing understanding in the context of mood and anxiety disorders.