Increasing the value of digital phenotyping through reducing missingness: a retrospective review and analysis of prior studies

Background

Digital phenotyping methods present a scalable tool to realise the potential of personalised medicine. But underlying this potential is the need for digital phenotyping data to represent accurate and precise health measurements.

Objective

To assess the impact of population, clinical, research and technological factors on the digital phenotyping data quality as measured by rates of missing digital phenotyping data.

Methods

This study analyses retrospective cohorts of mindLAMP smartphone application digital phenotyping studies run at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center between May 2019 and March 2022 involving 1178 participants (studies of college students, people with schizophrenia and people with depression/anxiety). With this large combined data set, we report on the impact of sampling frequency, active engagement with the application, phone type (Android vs Apple), gender and study protocol features on missingness/data quality.

Findings

Missingness from sensors in digital phenotyping is related to active user engagement with the application. After 3 days of no engagement, there was a 19% decrease in average data coverage for both Global Positioning System and accelerometer. Data sets with high degrees of missingness can generate incorrect behavioural features that may lead to faulty clinical interpretations.

Conclusions

Digital phenotyping data quality requires ongoing technical and protocol efforts to minimise missingness. Adding run-in periods, education with hands-on support and tools to easily monitor data coverage are all productive strategies studies can use today.

Clinical implications

While it is feasible to capture digital phenotyping data from diverse populations, clinicians should consider the degree of missingness in the data before using them for clinical decision-making.