Predictive Modeling of Mental Illness Onset Using Wearable Devices and Medical Examination Data: Machine Learning Approach

The prevention and treatment of mental illness is a serious social issue. Prediction and intervention, however, have been difficult because of lack of objective biomarkers for mental illness. The objective of this study was to use biometric data acquired from wearable devices as well as medical examination data to build a predictive model that can contribute to the prevention of the onset of mental illness. This was an observational study of 4,612 subjects from the health database of society-managed health insurance in Japan provided by JMDC Inc. The inputs to the predictive model were 3-months of continuous wearable data and medical examinations within and near that period; the output was the presence or absence of mental illness over the following month, as defined by insurance claims data. The features relating to the wearable data were sleep, activity, and resting heart rate, measured by a consumer-grade wearable device (specifically, Fitbit). The predictive model was built using the XGBoost algorithm and presented an area-under-the-receiver-operating-characteristic curve of 0.712 (SD = 0.02, a repeated stratified group 10-fold cross validation). The top-ranking feature importance measure was wearable data, and its importance was higher than the blood-test values from medical examinations. Detailed verification of the model showed that predictions were made based on disrupted sleep rhythms, mild physical activity duration, alcohol use, and medical examination data on disrupted eating habits as risk factors. In summary, the predictive model showed useful accuracy for grouping the risk of mental illness onset, suggesting the potential of predictive detection, and preventive intervention using wearable devices. Sleep abnormalities in particular were detected as wearable data 3 months prior to mental illness onset, and the possibility of early intervention targeting the stabilization of sleep as an effective measure for mental illness onset was shown.