Nature may be what the doctor orders to boost mental health

Nature may be what the doctor orders to boost mental health

Doctor's orders could look a little greener in the future. Researchers at the Beth Israel Digital Psychiatry Lab are investigating the correlation between mental health and time spent in green spaces. 

"I think where it becomes interesting, at least from a mental health point of view, is we know the environment has a tremendous impact on all of health. But we've never been able to quantify people's environmental exposures well, because you need two things: You need to know where someone is and for how long," Dr. John Torous, director of the digital psychiatry division at Beth Israel, told MobiHealthNews

Torous' lab is looking at using its platform mindLamp, which focuses on examining "digital biomarkers," or patient data gathered from both active and passive data, to help measure the correlation between schizophrenia symptoms and time spent in nature. 

"The idea is with the smartphone, we can set a frequency where we can ask the phone to collect the GPS ping. So that's happening in the background passively, and what we do then is encrypt that data and send it to our computer," Torous said.


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