What Happens to Mental Health at Work When Our Devices Know How We Feel?

Stress is rampant among managers today. Mobile technology might be able to help. Increasingly, we can expect our personal devices to diagnose, monitor, and manage our mental wellness. The omnipresence of these devices mean they are well positioned to do so, and analytics pulled from your phone or fitness tracker may soon be able to let you know when you’re getting depressed, working too hard, or need to make more time for self-care. There are privacy and data-security concerns with this, of course, but it’s inevitable that, as these tools improve, HR departments and managers will also want to use them to monitor and manage the mental wellness of their teams. Workplace analytics may ultimately be used to generate personalized recommendations and prescriptions for better anticipating or coping with mental health challenges.