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The Dartmouth
July 9, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Bioryhthm project monitors students

4.1.13.news.biorhythms
4.1.13.news.biorhythms

The subjects, 53 students in Campbells' Smartphone Programming course, received Google Nexus 4 Android smartphones for the study and for programming practice. Three participants elected to use on their own phones.

The phones were provided using two $10,000 grants from the Neukom Institute for Computational Science and the computer science department, Campbell said. Each phone has a background application that collects data about students' activities.

"The application runs in the background of your phone, and you never interact with it," Campbell said. "Because this phone has a bunch of sensors in it it has the accelerometer, the GPS to understand location, a light sensor, a microphone we can continuously infer things about your activity."

The microphone measures social interactions by monitoring voices to detect when a student is in or near a conversation.

The data collected over the course of the study could highlight correlations between students' stress levels, health and activities, such as exercise and social interactions, Campbell said.

Personality analyses combined with data tracking of students' stress levels and activities can also point out whether the different methods students use to combat stress are effective, said Catherine Norris, a psychology professor working with Campbell.

The study will look at the different ways that extroverted and introverted students deal with stress by using personality analyses, Norris said. The students' differing responses to stress can be measured by tracking their social interactions.

"An example of one of the things we'll be able to look at in this study is whether extroverts actually deal with stress by interacting more with friends," Norris said. "It would be a really interesting finding if we were able to say that on a day that extroverts report high stress, they actually seek out more social interaction and that actually improves their mood over the course of the term."

The convergence of smartphone sensing technology and psychology separates the Dartmouth Biorhythms study from previous research in personality psychology and the social sciences, said Randy Colvin, a Northeastern University psychology professor working on the study.

Many personality psychology studies are subject to personal biases since they usually require some type of human interaction for data collection, Colvin said. When a researcher collects information directly from subjects, they may choose to answer questions in a way that reflects upon them more favorably. Using smartphones to collect data in the background bypasses human interaction by observing subjects in a more natural setting.

"What smartphones can do to change the field of personality psychology is that nobody has to say anything," Colvin said. "You just carry the phone around with you and it tells us things about what you do."

Using smartphone technology in data collection allows student behavior to be tracked more closely. Keeping a close eye on the subjects will help researchers detect relationships between the various factors influencing subjects' stress levels and moods, said Sam Gosling, a University of Texas at Austin psychology professor and study researcher.

Because the study will collect an unprecedented volume of data on students' behavior, the research team has made sure to preserve students' privacy when analyzing the data.

"I don't want Dartmouth students to think that we're snooping on them," Campbell said. "We're very cognizant of maintaining the anonymity and privacy of the information and also not crossing the line into students' lives, as they would not cross the line into my life."

Campbell's study was inspired by the fast pace of the quarter system. Before coming to Dartmouth, Campbell taught electrical engineering at Columbia University, which follows a semester schedule.

In the future, the study could be expanded to study student stress at schools on a semester schedule, Norris said.

The study began at the start of spring term, and it is too premature to draw any conclusions about the study and its objectives.

"Because it's a first, I don't know exactly where it's going to lead," Campbell said. "But I definitely see it impacting the general well-being of the student body."