Custom keyboards and mental health research

Your keyboard may know more about your brain than your doctor does. A study in the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science looks at several research projects with very exciting findings.

The Study

A study in the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science followed adults for a few weeks and looked at nothing but typing metadata.

The data was gathered from a custom keyboard, and included the delay between key presses, how often people typed, and accelerometer data from the phone.

The Findings

The findings are striking. Typing speed predicted processing speed and executive function, and the link got stronger as depressive symptoms increased. The researchers see a path toward detecting subtle cognitive changes before a depressive or manic episode sets in.

What makes this possible is that typing is passive. No clinic visit, no test to sit through, no excessive effort from the participant. People just use their phone.

Custom Keyboards

The part I find exciting is that none of this works without a custom keyboard. A research keyboard has to be good enough that participants actually keep it as their default. That is a hard piece of software to build, and building it from scratch is not what a research team should spend its time on.

A growing number of these keyboards are not built from scratch. They run on KeyboardKit, and we’re happy to give researchers the tools they need.

Further Reading

For more information, see this article at psypost.org.