image: Dartmouth computer science professor Andrew Campbell (pictured) and his colleagues were recognized with the 2024 UbiComp 10-Year Impact Award for the influence of their 2014 mobile-sensing study of college students' mental health on the development of mobile and wearable health tech. Campbell was motivated to improve mental-health intervention after losing his brother to mental illness.
Credit: Eli Burakian '00
A Dartmouth study that introduced a smartphone app for monitoring the mental well-being of students received the 2024 10-Year Impact Award from UbiComp/ISWC 2024, the world’s top conference for mobile computing. The paper and app, called StudentLife, were recognized for their impact on the development of mobile and wearable health technology during the past decade.
Andrew Campbell, Dartmouth's Albert Bradley 1915 Third Century Professor of Computer Science and lead researcher of the 2014 paper, dedicated the award to his brother, whose struggle with mental illness inspired Campbell to improve intervention strategies.
"As a teacher, I often wondered what was happening behind my students' stressed faces and how we could help," Campbell said when receiving the award at the conference in Melbourne, Australia. Sharing the award are study co-authors Rui Wang, Guarini '18, Fanglin Chen, Guarini '15, Zhenyu Chen, Guarini '15, Tianxing Li, Guarini '20, former Dartmouth faculty members Dror Ben-Zeev and Xia Zhou, as well as Gabriella Harari, then a graduate student at University of Texas at Austin, and Stefanie Tignor, formerly a professor at Northeastern University.
The researchers developed the first-of-its-kind StudentLife app to monitor sleep duration, physical activity, location on campus, social interactions, and stress levels for the 48 Dartmouth students who signed up for the study. The app automatically tracked these metrics over 10 weeks using sensors built into phones.
Machine learning algorithms and other computational methods assessed the data to infer students' mental states and correlate them with academic performance and behavioral trends over the course of the study.
The researchers found that student mental-health patterns and stress levels correlated strongly with academic performance, social interactions, and behavior. When the workload mounted, students exhibited a drop in the time they slept, worked out in a gym, and time spent talking to friends.
Campbell, who was also monitoring himself, noticed that his sleep, stress, and mood levels were worse than the students he was teaching. "That said a lot about faculty life," he quipped.
It was clear that phones were a valuable tool to provide continuous mental health assessment and could potentially be used to design crucial interventions. "The StudentLife study was timely because it began in the early years of the emerging mental health crisis among young adults, particularly on college campuses," Campbell said. "It's during these college years that young adults are most likely to experience their first mental health episode."
The latest study using StudentLife tracked more than 200 Dartmouth students during all four years of college — including through the pandemic — and captured the most detailed data yet on students’ self-esteem and mental health during their time as undergraduates. Published in March, the study is the longest ever conducted using mobile-sensing technology and identifies key populations and stressors that administrators could target to improve student well-being.
In their citation, the UbiComp 2024 conference awards committee said of the initial study, "This groundbreaking paper has had an exceptional influence and significant impact on the field. It pioneered the integration of mental health research with mobile data mining, addressing real-world challenges in innovative ways. The availability of the dataset to the community also exemplifies exemplary research practices."
Since the 2014 paper's publication, hundreds of mental health studies have used smartphones and wearables.
"The pioneering work on student mental health using mobile sensing by Andrew and his co-authors has inspired researchers around the world to explore the effects of mental health on college campuses and elsewhere using smartphones," said Devin Balckom, professor and chair of the computer science department at Dartmouth. "Their seminal paper is a fitting choice for the 10-year UbiComp award that recognizes research with a sustained and significant impact."