Digital Phenotyping for Mental Health: Validity, Equity, and Implementation

Abstract

This systematic perspective examines digital phenotyping for mental-health monitoring. The organizing question is when passive digital signals provide clinically meaningful information rather than device- and context-specific proxies. Ten related scholarly sources are synthesized through a decision-centered framework spanning problem definition, mechanism, measurement, evaluation, implementation, and governance. The review does not invent experiments, pooled estimates, or unreported quantitative results. It instead evaluates the strength and transferability of the available evidence, with particular attention to treating continuous data collection as equivalent to continuous clinical insight. The resulting framework links technical or empirical performance to explicit use conditions and identifies tests that should precede wider adoption in measurement-based mental-health care.