Tracking the fitness of your brain
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
[Applause]
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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you