News

Since her time as an undergraduate student, Sarah Sperry’s academic and professional career has been dedicated to providing improved care for individuals with bipolar spectrum disorders.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, approximately 5.7 million adults in the U.S. are diagnosed with bipolar disorder each year, totalling about 2.6% of the adult population.

Having spent dozens of hours working in clinical settings through her graduate studies, Sperry became frustrated with the state of research in this area, finding there was no “gold-standard” of measuring, in real time, how individuals with bipolar disorder came to experience moments of crisis – and if there were signs that could help identify those moments were coming.

“The needs of individuals experiencing a moment of crisis due to these disorders are so different, and therefore require different interventions, and I didn’t see much research happening that addressed the signs of that crisis before it happened,” Sperry said.  “So I wanted to focus on first identifying those signs and then using that information to tailor support and resources.”

As a postdoctoral research coordinator, Sperry learned about ecological momentary assessment (EMA), a methodology involving “repeated assessments/surveys to collect data describing respondents’ current or very recent experiences and related contexts in their natural environments.” She decided to pursue her Ph.D. with a mentor who could teach her about EMA to develop these methods for research in bipolar disorder.

At the time, EMA was being conducted with Palm Pilots (now conducted with smartphones) and study participants would share what they are experiencing in real time. To capture “real life” data, an alarm would go off eight times per day for participants to fill out their survey no matter what they were doing.

Seeking a more robust infrastructure for this type of research, Sperry came to U-M with the hopes of making the use of mobile technology to collect data in a more accessible way to address the challenges faced by individuals with bipolar.

Enter the Mobile Technologies Core, housed within U-M’s Eisenberg Family Depression Center. The core provides research teams with guidance and resources necessary to utilize mobile technologies and digital mental health measures in their studies.

Developed in collaboration with partners across the university, the core’s focus is “to leverage the capabilities of mobile technologies to facilitate high-impact health research that includes mental health parameters to accelerate the discovery of whole-person treatments and prevention strategies”.

“I worked with the core very early on to identify a wearable piece of technology that we could have participants wear instead of having to use aging tech like big, research-grade devices with limited scale,” Sperry said. “I wanted to better understand how we could make studies measuring daily life experiences with EMA and wearable devices as easy and comfortable as possible for participants, while ensuring we are getting as much accurate data as possible. The core provided a lot of support and opportunities for collaboration to ensure we got this right.”

Research cores are shared university facilities that offer specialized research services, equipment or expertise to U-M researchers, often at a recharge rate.

With the information gathered from the real-time wearable technology, Sperry and her team will be able to better identify situations that may trigger episodes in those living with bipolar disorder, combining EMA and wearable devices. This upstream prevention strategy could prove crucial to addressing the unique needs of each individual during periods of risk.

Formed in 2021, the Mobile Technologies Core has worked alongside Sperry and others to reduce barriers to using technology in their work. It also provides faculty and their teams the opportunity to work across disciplines and research areas to allow for more innovative, groundbreaking research outcomes. Though the core does not limit its services to mental health research, it does encourage mental health measures to be considered when appropriate to study objectives.

Image

“Being able to provide a robust set of resources for our faculty is our primary goal, and we want to make that information as easily accessible as possible for them,” said Victoria Bennett, core manager.

The potential of using mobile technology in mental health-related research is endless, Bennett said.

“The work of researchers is critical – some of the methodologies within mobile technology research enable multiple questions to be asked and studies to be conducted concurrently. This is so important in a field that is constantly evolving. And if our core can provide the support, resources and partnerships that help move the work forward, then we can do things others have not.”

Sarah Sperry, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Michigan and the director of the Emotion and Temporal Dynamics (EmoTe) Lab.