Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Jun 8, 2022
Date Accepted: Feb 6, 2023
The use of photoplethysmography in the assessment of mental health
ABSTRACT
Background:
With the rise in mental health problems globally, mHealth provides an opportunity for timely medical care and accessibility. One emerging area of mHealth involves using photoplethysmogram (PPG) to diagnose and monitor mental health.
Objective:
Given the rise in PPG based technology for mental health diagnosis and monitoring , coupled with the growing need to increase accessibility to timely mental health services, we aimed to evaluate the evidence surrounding this technology. We conducted a review to understand how PPG has been evaluated for diagnosing a range of mental health and psychological problems, including wellbeing, stress, depression, and anxiety.
Methods:
A scoping review was undertaken.
Results:
The review search resulted in 3394 unique articles, a final list of 24 papers was identified. Although there was variation in study quality, overall PPG appears to be promising for diagnosing mental health problems. The accuracy was relatively high across the studies compared with a standard mental health assessment. PPG was found to be effective for diagnosing depression, anxiety, stress, and suicidal ideation. This included finger- and face-based PPG methods as well as emerging smartphone-based methods. PPG holds promise as a new technology for rapidly increasing access to mental health services and receiving a diagnosis as well as monitoring symptoms. However, rigorous validation is needed in diverse clinical populations to move the PPG technology forward in tackling mental health problems.
Conclusions:
PPG holds promise for diagnosing mental health problems, but more research is needed before it can be widely recommended for clinical use. Clinical Trial: N/A
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.