While wearables offer promising tools, they’re not yet a replacement for self-reports. Instead, they highlight the complexity of mental health—where both subjective experiences and objective data have unique roles to play.

Check out the "Behind the paper" blog post here:
go.nature.com/4jLA6x5

This raises critical questions:
• What do subjective vs. objective sleep measures really capture?
• Can we ever rely solely on passive data to understand mental health?
• How should we combine these data sources for better insights?

In our latest study, we find that how participants self-report their sleep quality differs dramatically from their wearable device measured sleep – and that both were important to understanding their depression symptoms.

Huge thank you to all the co-authors!@depressionlab.bsky.social

3) Anomaly detection doesn't seem to be as important for depression symptoms as it is for other conditions like relapse in those with schizophrenia (at least in a 3 month timescale)

4) We can kind of detect momentary subjective state (reward & affect) with just 2 hours of passive data!

Key points:
1) We can indeed detect some *specific* symptoms of depression with passive wearable data and no prior information from a given individual (nomothetic modeling)

2) self-reported and passively measured sleep quality are different in how they relate to depression, both are important

Thanks! I may just need to replace all my poetry based packages with uv...

Whats the transition like from poetry?