Psychiatric disorders are leading causes of disability worldwide. Unlike other medical disciplines, psychiatry currently lacks biomarkers, i.e. objective and measurable indicators of mental states that can aid clinical decision making, the same way for example that blood pressure is used to assess the risk of stroke in cardiology. Furthermore, patients are only seen every few weeks or months in the doctor’s office with limited scope for monitoring and acting on mental states that might start unfolding in the time between appointments.
Increasing adoption of wearables and, on the other hand, advances in artificial intelligence can help overcome these limitations with unprecedented opportunities to extend symptoms’ monitoring to the patient day-to-day life beyond sparse medical appointments, enabling timely interventions, and support clinical decisions with digital biomarkers.