Discovery of Behavioral Markers of Social Anxiety from Smartphone Sensor Data

Better understanding of an individual's smartphone use can help researchers to understand the relationship between behaviors and mental health, and ultimately improve methods for early detection, evaluation, and intervention. This relationship may be particularly significant for individuals with social anxiety, for whom stress from social interactions may arise repeatedly and unexpectedly over the course of a day. For this reason, we present an exploratory study of behavioral markers extracted from smartphone data. We examine fine-grained behaviors before and after smartphone communication events across social anxiety levels. To discover behavioral markers, we model the smartphone as a linear dynamical system with the accelerometer data as output. In a two-week study of 52 college students, we find substantially different behavioral markers prior to outgoing phone calls when comparing individuals with high and low social anxiety.