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PTSD-Monitoring App Captured the Psychological Effects of the Boston Bombing
the_newsbeagle writes "This DARPA-funded smartphone app is designed to monitor veterans for signs of depression and PTSD. It screens for signals of psychological distress in a number of ways; for example, the app looks for signs of social isolation (reduced number of phone calls and texts), physical isolation (the phone isn't leaving the house), and sleep disruption (the phone is used in the middle of the night). Interestingly, the company that invented the app was testing it in Boston at the time of the Boston marathon bombing, and reports that the app picked up signals of distress in the days after the attack."
This was a standard clinical study with 100 fully-aware participants trying to improve PTSD diagnosis to help the incidents of suicide and psychological issues in returning vets. You've got plenty of other things to gripe about with PATRIOT / PRISM / etc., but for crying out loud this isn't one of them.
I'd say the more depressing is that I see 4 posts by numbered Slashdotters and not one even read the first sentence of the summary.
Here it is again:
This DARPA-funded smartphone app is designed to monitor veterans for signs of depression and PTSD.
Smartphone app, as in, it has to be installed on the phone and records behavior to send off to some user approved (even if by obscure yes/no choice) observer to look for suspicious behavior trends.
There were volunteers, they were in Boston, and the marathon got bombed during the testing phase. A significant portion of the volunteers showed the warning behaviors in the days afterward. This is all in the summary, but I suppose actually reading the whole summary and devising an informed post would take too long. Of course, one of the signs "not leaving the house" was probably due to the not-quite-martial-law that was not-exactly-imposed on the city of Boston for those days.
Indeed. Personally, I found the bombing to be less disturbing than the reaction to the bombing, and even more, the reports of how many Bostonians found the actions acceptable.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Christ almighty, I know we like to not RTFA and gripe about the govt and everything, but this was used in a study with willing participants. No one is using this to track you. Chill the fuck out.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself – anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called."
-- George Orwell, 1984
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese