The promise and challenges of computer mouse trajectories in DMHIs: a feasibility study on pre-treatment dropout predictionsShow others and affiliations
2025 (English)In: Internet Interventions, ISSN 2214-7829, Vol. 40, article id 100828
Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
With the impetus of Digital Mental Health Interventions (DMHIs), complex data can be leveraged to improve and personalize mental health care. However, most approaches rely on a very limited number of often costly features. Computer mouse trajectories can be unobtrusively and cost-efficiently gathered and seamlessly integrated into current baseline processes. Empirical evidence suggests that mouse movements hold information on user motivation and attention, both valuable aspects otherwise difficult to measure at scale. Further, mouse trajectories can already be collected on pre-treatment questionnaires, making them a promising candidate for early predictions informing treatment allocation. Therefore, this paper discusses how to collect and process mouse trajectory data on questionnaires in DMHIs. Covering different complexity levels, we combine hand-crafted features with non-sequential machine learning models, as well as spatiotemporal raw mouse data with state-of-the-art sequential neural networks. The data processing pipeline for the latter includes task-specific pre-processing to convert the variable length trajectories into a single prediction per user. As a feasibility study, we collected mouse trajectory data from 183 patients filling out a pre-intervention depression questionnaire. While the hand-crafted features slightly improve baseline predictions, the spatiotemporal models underperform. However, considering our small data set size, we propose more research to investigate the potential value of this novel and promising data type and provide the necessary steps and open-source code to do so.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Elsevier, 2025. Vol. 40, article id 100828
Keywords [en]
Dropout, E-mental health, ICBT, Machine learning, Prediction
National Category
Applied Psychology
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-237787DOI: 10.1016/j.invent.2025.100828Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105002214015OAI: oai:DiVA.org:umu-237787DiVA, id: diva2:1953352
Funder
Swedish Research CouncilFamiljen Erling-Perssons StiftelseFredrik och Ingrid Thurings StiftelseStiftelsen Söderström - Königska sjukhemmetForte, Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and WelfareStiftelsen Professor Bror Gadelius MinnesfondGerman Research Foundation (DFG)2025-04-212025-04-212025-04-21Bibliographically approved