JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

It has tremendous potential for both research and clinical applications, but challenges our conception of healthcare by opposing two distinct approaches to medicine: one centered around illness, with the aim of classifying and curing disease, the other centered around patients and their personal suffering and lived experience. In the context of mental health and psychiatry, while digital phenotyping holds out the promise of novel treatment avenues and the empowerment of patients to regulate their own health, it entails the sacrifice of the human approach to patients’ suffering that forms the very foundation of psychotherapy. In this article, we review the formidable advances rendered possible by digital phenotyping and highlight the risk that this technology may pose in partially or even wholly excluding healthcare professionals from the diagnosis and therapeutic process, thereby foregoing an essential dimension of care. We end by setting out concrete recommendations as to how to improve current digital phenotyping technology so that it can be harnessed to redefine mental health by empowering patients without alienating them.