Smartphone sensing of sleep in depression, anxiety, and psychotic disorder patients: a novel unexplored tool

Sleep is an important feature in mental illnesses. Currently, the sleep assessment gold standard is PSG or EEG, which is limited by resources, expense, and time. Smartphones could provide a novel opportunity to assess, intervene, and monitor sleep, yet there is little prior application. We systematically review the literature on smartphones use for sleep research in patients with depressive, anxiety, or psychotic disorders. Our search identified 5 studies. In most of them, the authors used smartphones for sleep subjective assessment. Relationships between human behavior and sleep parameters were established as well. Therefore, the use of smartphones to monitor and intervene is feasible and worth exploring. Future research should focus on comparison between smartphone collected data vs. subjective measurements, and PSG, improvement of patients’ quality of life via sleep smartphone apps, definition of longitudinal data added value, and adaptive personalized systems to predict risk/relapse.