Digital Brain Biomarkers of Human Cognition and Mood

By comparison to the functional metrics available in other medical disciplines, conventional measures of neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders have several limitations. They are obtrusive, requiring a subject to break from their normal routine. They are episodic and provide sparse snapshots of a patient only at the time of the assessment. They require subjects to perform a task outside of the context of everyday behavior. And lastly, they are poorly scalable, taxing limited resources. We present validation studies that demonstrate the clinical efficacy of a new approach in reproducing gold-standard neuropsychological measures. We discuss the neuroscience constructs and mathematical underpinnings of cognition and mood measurement from human-computer interaction data. We conclude with a discussion on four areas that we predict will be impacted by these new clinical measurements: (i) understanding of the interdependency between cognition and mood; (ii) nosology of psychiatric illnesses; (iii) drug discovery; and (iv) delivery of healthcare services.