Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Wearable Sensors Outperform Behavioral Coding As Valid Marker Of Childhood Anxiety And Depression, Ellen Mcginnis, Ryan Mcginnis, Jessica Hruschak, Emily Bilek, Ka Ip, Diana Morelen, Jamie Lawler, Kate Fitzgerald, Katherine Rosenblum, Maria Musik

ETSU Faculty Works

There is a significant need to develop objective measures for identifying children under the age of 8 who have anxiety and depression. If left untreated, early internalizing symptoms can lead to adolescent and adult internalizing disorders as well as comorbidity which can yield significant health problems later in life including increased risk for suicide. To this end, we propose the use of an instrumented fear induction task for identifying children with internalizing disorders, and demonstrate its efficacy in a sample of 63 children between the ages of 3 and 7. In so doing, we extract objective measures that capture the …