NEAR WEST SIDE — When Alex Leow first pitched the idea of a fitness tracker for the human brain about five years ago, people told her they thought she was out of her mind.
“Sometimes I say that we are trying to turn science fiction into science,” said Leow, a biomedical engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “But sometimes crazy ideas are the ones that are going to really revolutionize the way we think about certain things.”
Leow’s idea for a brain fitness tracker came from her side passion for the piano. She noticed that her piano-playing skills fluctuated based on her mood and concentration levels, she said. She realized her finger’s movements on the keyboard indicated a level of understanding about much more than her piano skills.
Leow connected the musical keyboard with the keyboard on her smartphone, which led her to develop BiAffect, an app and research study that analyzes smartphone keyboard data patterns to learn about a person’s neuropsychological state.
Currently, those using the app are citizen scientists recruited by Leow’s team whose data is helping researchers better understand the science of the brain.
Growing up in Taiwan, Leow said there was a culture of silence around issues of mental health, and she has seen that silence exacerbate the mental health crisis in Asian communities.
It was an issue Leow wanted to tackle for her community and others around the world, she said. Mental health has always been the more understudied aspect of the brain in comparison to the neurological aspect, she said. She was eager to take on the challenge.
Leow said the BiAffect app provides users with constant personalized data that can help detect mental illness. Texting frequency may point toward signs of a manic episode, for example; Leow’s team has also seen a correlation between frequent typos and higher levels of depression, she said.
Leow hopes that sharing this data with patients will help them gain more agency in their relationships with their health care providers and doctors.
“If we could present that biomarker information on a dashboard, the user can then take this information, they can learn about their brain biology, and we can take that information back to their psychiatrist or provider or neurologist,” Leow said. “That can close the loop, and I’m very excited about this possibility.”
Leow said the app has the potential to expand into the content of messages on smartphones, enabling researchers to identify language and speech patterns that might indicate more severe depression and suicidality. However, this brings up issues of privacy, and Leow said she would only feel comfortable proceeding with the technology if there were assurances that the data would remain on a person’s personal device.
Leow said she aims to involve consumers in every aspect of the app’s development. The technology on the app has already advanced from its prototype. It can now detect various potential indicators of mental illness, including if a subject is sitting while texting, typing with one hand or typing while lying down.
“There’s a lot of a lot of information we can extract by intelligently leveraging all the sensors that we have in our modern technology, wearable technology,” Leow said. “I think the future is to combine this technology and use this to design new ways of delivering medical treatment, in ways of collecting data in real time, and in people’s natural environments.”
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