Tracking the fitness of your brain

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there are many

limitations with the way we assess brain

health

and mental health as a psychiatrist

i noticed that a lot of times my

patients don’t necessarily feel

comfortable

sharing with me their darkest feelings

and even if they do share they may not

be able

to evaluate these feelings objectively

moreover they come to see me for 30

minutes

once or twice a month but they live with

their symptoms

24 hours a day and seven days a week

imagine that one day

we can evaluate brain health not only

continuously

and objectively but also outside of a

doctor’s office

with my background in both medicine

and technology i had an aha moment

when wearable technologies such as

fitbit and apple watch became popular

i asked myself if there are

fitness checkers for the human body why

can we have

fitness trackers for the human brain

but how are we going to build a brain

fitness tracker again

my experiences outside of medicine

gave me the second aha moment

as an amateur pianist i’m always

noticing that how well i play

is linked to my concentration and my

mood

for that day so one day as i was

playing the piano it occurred to me

that we should of course look into the

way

we use the keyboard on our smartphones

to show you what i mean recently i was

evaluating someone

with bipolar disorder also known as

manic depression as this person

was in a manic state i was noticing how

much faster

they were speaking now if

i’m talking faster i’m also going to be

typing faster

right especially nowadays we all text

more

than we make phone calls

so with this intuition we put together a

team of researchers and programmers

and we decided to make our own

smartphone keyboard and we put this

keyboard

on the app store for everyone to use

this is how it works after the keyboard

is downloaded

you can set it to replace your standard

iphone keyboard

every time you’re texting someone

writing an email

or posting on social media the timing of

each key press

is saved so that we can understand

how fast or slow you’re typing the

rhythm

of your typing as well as how often you

use the backspace

and the frequency of your typos

if you use this keyboard consistently

you would start seeing feedback

information

on the dashboard of our app

such as how many key presses you have

entered for that day

just like you see how many steps you’ve

taken for that day

if you wear a fitness tracker today

i have entered more than 4 300 key

presses so far

and more than 300 of them are backspaces

but how do we as researchers analyze

all this data to give you an intuitive

idea

we can for example quantify your typing

performance

by taking into account both the speed

of your typing and the accuracy of your

typing

now we can take it a step further by

harnessing the power

of artificial intelligence

thanks to citizen science we have

recruited

more than 2 000 participants and

analyzed more than

30 million key presses as of today

in fact we are now feeding all this

typing information

into algorithms and see how well

we can predict brain health even when a

person

is not in a doctor’s office

so what have we learned from our citizen

scientists

so far i would like to highlight a few

findings

in particular i want to talk about how

the way we type

changes as we get older

or when we feel depressed

but first we have our best typing

performance

a few hours after we wake up in the

morning

after our typing performance reached its

peak

it then fluctuates and gradually drops

towards

the end of the day and this is the

reason why

we should think twice before writing

that

long work email at night

i don’t do it myself anymore

how about age how does age affect the

way we type

we found that this fluctuation in typing

performance

is more magnified as we get older

we are now running a new study and see

if you can use this fluctuation to

better

understand early signs of alzheimer’s

disease

with regards to depression our citizen

scientists

tend to make more typos and pause

more when they experience higher degrees

of depressive symptoms

again this is consistent with my

observations

in that my patients say to me all the

time

that when they are depressed they can’t

stay focused

and they can’t maintain their

concentration

so now that i’ve shared some of our

findings

that supported the feasibility of a

brain

finish tracker i want to emphasize

that we still have a lot of work to do

and there will be other ways of

measuring brain health using technology

the future of technology should be about

the well-being

of all of us we can all

work together and use technology

to improve the assessment the diagnosis

and the treatment of brain disorders

thank you very much

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