Dense Sampling Approaches for Psychiatry Research: Combining Scanners and Smartphones

Abstract

Together, data from brain scanners and smartphones have sufficient coverage of biology, psychology, and environment to articulate between-person differences in the interplay within and across biological, psychological, and environmental systems thought to underlie psychopathology. An important next step is to develop frameworks that combine these two modalities in ways that leverage their coverage across layers of human experience to have maximum impact on our understanding and treatment of psychopathology. We review literature published in the last 3 years highlighting how scanners and smartphones have been combined to date, outline and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of existing approaches, and sketch a network science framework heretofore underrepresented in work combining scanners and smartphones that can push forward our understanding of health and disease.

Keywords: Ambulatory assessment; Experience sampling; Magnetic resonance imaging; Network analysis.