mood.mic is a privacy-preserving tool for monitoring bipolar disorder. It allows users to track their moods by telling a story about an image twice a day for 60 seconds. From this recording, we calculate rate of speech. We chose to use only rate of speech as a metric for tracking mood because it is commonly used by clinicians to diagnose and track bipolar.
A person experiencing bipolar mania or hypomania may exhibit more rapid speech and pressure to keep talking, while a person experiencing a depressive state may experience reduced rate of speech. We ran a pilot study with individuals with bipolar, and in our interviews found that participants self-reported high ratings for the accuracy of voice tracking and expressed a strong desire for an "objective metric" for tracking their moods.
mood.mic is a fully functional, deployed application for iPhone and Android and has been evaluated in a pilot study with both individuals with mood disorders and without mood disorders.