photo of john torous
John Torous, MD
Director, Digital Psychiatry Division, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
Using Digital Psychiatry and Mobile Health for Early Diagnosis and Treatment

Mental illnesses are complex brain diseases that vary over time, environments, and social settings. Our team uses digital technologies like smartphones and wearable sensors to capture the lived experiences of those with mental illness across numerous domains ranging from cognition to sleep, mood to screen time, step count to circadian rhythms. Drawing from clinical psychiatry, neuroscience, computer science, and data science – our team applies machine learning methods to uncover new patterns about mental health that allow better prediction illness and personalization of treatment.

Our digital work centers around a digital health platform we have created called mindLAMP (Learn, Assess, Manage, Prevent) that enables digital phenotyping, mobile interventions, and remote research. With the CORTEX platform, our analysis tool that automatically turns patient or participant data into useful features, we aim provide valuable insight to clinicians and researchers. Together we are able to offer digital phenotyping designed to inform neuroscience. Our team is active in studying schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety disorders across the lifespan and building bridges between behavioral and neurosciences. Because of the scalability of this work, we have active projects in India, Australia, Canada, the UK, and many US sites.