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StudentLife: Using Smartphones to Assess Mental Health and Academic Performance of College Students

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Abstract

Much of the stress and strain of student life remains hidden. The StudentLife continuous sensing app assesses the day-to-day and week-by-week impact of workload on stress, sleep, activity, mood, sociability, mental well-being and academic performance of a single class of 48 students across a 10 weeks term at Dartmouth College using Android phones. Results from the StudentLife study show a number of significant correlations between the automatic objective sensor data from smartphones and mental health and educational outcomes of the student body. We propose a simple model based on linear regression with lasso regularization that can accurately predict cumulative GPA. We also identify a Dartmouth term lifecycle in the data that shows students start the term with high positive affect and conversation levels, low stress, and healthy sleep and daily activity patterns. As the term progresses and the workload increases, stress appreciably rises while positive affect, sleep, conversation and activity drops off. The StudentLife dataset is publicly available on the web.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

    Rui Wang, Fanglin Chen, Zhenyu Chen, Tianxing Li, Xia Zhou & Andrew T. Campbell

  2. The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Gabriella Harari

  3. Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

    Stefanie Tignor

  4. Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, University of Washington, 1959 NE Pacific Street, Box 356560, Room BB1644, WA, 98195-6560, Seattle, USA

    Dror Ben-Zeev

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  1. Rui Wang
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  2. Fanglin Chen
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  3. Zhenyu Chen
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  4. Tianxing Li
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Correspondence to Rui Wang .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    James M. Rehg

  2. Department of Statistics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

    Susan A. Murphy

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee, USA

    Santosh Kumar

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Wang, R. et al. (2017). StudentLife: Using Smartphones to Assess Mental Health and Academic Performance of College Students. In: Rehg, J., Murphy, S., Kumar, S. (eds) Mobile Health. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51394-2_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51394-2_2

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