Brooke Ammerman, assistant professor of psychology and director of the ASSIST Lab, was recently featured in “Why ‘Screen Time’ for Kids is a Parenting Pitfall” on WebMD. The article highlights Ammerman’s approach to gathering better data on a person’s digital life:
To gather better data, Ammerman and her team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are using a new approach called screenomics – the moment-by-moment capture and analysis of a person’s digital life, or “screenome.” Research participants install an app on their phones that takes a screen shot every five seconds, collecting 95,000 images in a month.
“If someone begins thinking about suicide, what was happening in the hours and days leading up to that?” Ammerman said. “And ultimately then, what can we do to prevent or intervene upon these processes?”
The Wisconsin team is analyzing how nighttime use (and non-use suggestive of sleep) is associated with suicidal thoughts and planning, and they can even analyze how different types of phone use – such as using the keyboard or not and during which hours – may be linked to suicidal thoughts.
The end goal is to develop a phone app that tracks usage, alerting the person and sending resources if it detects high-risk patterns. Ammerman’s prior work has revealed about 250 words associated with suicide that may be more likely to appear on people’s phones in the three hours leading up to suicidal thoughts or planning.
“We have a paper under review right now that highlights that individuals with lived suicidality are actually pretty open to the idea of having their smartphone use monitored as a way to determine the timing of an intervention,” Ammerman said. “That paves the way for the idea of having an app on your phone that does this sort of monitoring and could help people in real moments of distress.”