Mobile Phone Sensing using the Built-in Camera

Modern mobile phones or smartphones have multipurpose functions apart from being used as a device for voice and text communications. They are also embedded with many useful sensors, including camera, barometer, accelerometer, and digital compass. Unlike other types of sensor, the smartphone camera has been underutilized. This paper aims to fill the gap by analyzing and reviewing the hardware and software components of smartphones and highlighting the potential uses of the smartphone camera to support human daily life activities. A simple search of research papers indexed in Google Scholar was carried out using guided terms. The papers were filtered to match the research questions for this study. Only relevant papers were analyzed and reviewed. The results of the analysis suggested that the rapid development in the smartphone hardware has extended the use of the smartphone cameras beyond personal and social photography. Consequently, applications (apps) based on smartphone cameras emerge, such as barcode readers, document digitizing tools, augmented reality, translation tools, and indoor positioning device. These apps benefit users and facilitate them in their daily life activities.

Fusing Mobile Phone Sensing and Brain Imaging to Assess Depression in College Students

As smartphone usage has become increasingly prevalent in our society, so have rates of depression, particularly among young adults. Individual differences in smartphone usage patterns have been shown to reflect individual differences in underlying affective processes such as depression (Wang et al., 2018). In the current study, we identified a positive relationship between smartphone screen time (e.g. phone unlock duration) and resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) between the subgenual cingulate cortex (sgCC), a brain region implicated in depression and antidepressant treatment response, and regions of the ventromedial/orbitofrontal cortex, such that increased phone usage was related to stronger connectivity between these regions. We then used this cluster to constrain subsequent analyses looking at depressive symptoms in the same cohort and observed partial replication in a separate cohort. We believe the data and analyses presented here provide relatively simplistic initial analyses which replicate and provide a first step in combining functional brain activity and smartphone usage patterns to better understand issues related to mental health. Smartphones are a prevalent part of modern life and the usage of mobile sensing data from smartphones promises to be an important tool for mental health diagnostics and neuroscience research.