Currently submitted to: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Oct 11, 2026
Open Peer Review Period: Oct 12, 2026 - Dec 7, 2026
(currently open for review)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
GPS Mobility and Next-Day Posttraumatic Stress, Depression, and Anxiety Symptoms: An Intensive Longitudinal Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Passively sensed digital biomarkers related to GPS mobility have been shown to be associated with symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety in past research. Existing work has largely focused on between-persons associations between GPS mobility and mental health symptoms, obscuring how within-person changes in GPS mobility are associated with mental health symptoms. Further, given the significant overlap in mental health symptoms, research is needed to clarify how GPS mobility may predict mental health in samples with more complex symptoms.
Objective:
This study evaluated the relationships between lagged GPS mobility with next-day PTSD, depression, and anxiety symptoms in a sample of adults experiencing clinically significant PTSD symptoms.
Methods:
A sample of adults experiencing clinically significant PTSD symptoms (PTSD Checklist for DSM-5 (PCL-5) score ≥ 31; N = 72) participated in a 21-day intensive longitudinal study. Participants completed four daily EMA surveys capturing their PTSD, anxiety, and depression symptoms. In addition, participants provided continuous access to their passively sensed data from their smartphone’s GPS. GPS mobility features identified in past research were computed, including daily values for total distance traveled, maximum distance from home, normalized entropy, entropy, homestay, location variance, and number of distinct places traveled. Linear mixed effect models were used to examine the relationship between lagged daily GPS features and next-day PTSD, depression, and anxiety symptoms.
Results:
There were significant negative associations between lagged entropy and next-day depression symptoms, past-day normalized entropy and next-day depression symptoms, and the number of distinct places visited the prior day and next-day depression symptoms. There were no significant associations between lagged GPS mobility variables and next-day PTSD symptoms or lagged GPS mobility variables and next-day anxiety symptoms.
Conclusions:
Evidence reflects that within-person changes in GPS mobility are more strongly tied to subsequent depression symptoms, compared to PTSD or anxiety symptoms. There is little indication that daily changes in GPS mobility can reliably predict subsequent PTSD or anxiety symptoms among adults with clinically significant PTSD symptoms. Further research is needed to identify passively sensed digital biomarkers that are reliably associated with PTSD and anxiety symptoms.
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