মন মাঝি || Mind Navigator

A minimal system to assess mental health of people from low-resource settings

The main goal of the Mon Majhi project (in English, it is closely related to Mind Navigator) is to develop a minimal and real-time system for assessing mental conditions in low-resource settings. Due to the low cost and high availability of smartphones among people, particularly among the youth of developing regions, we chose it as the data-stream source to develop our system.

I lead this project with the cordial support of Prof. Nova Ahmed. Tanvir Hasan is also with us as a researcher and significantly contributes in several ways. A part of this project is going to be conducted in collaboration with Prof. Salekul Islam (Co-PI, NSU-UIU Grant).

Fund

BDT 499,500. PI: Prof. Nova Ahmed, NSU. Co-PI: Prof. Salekul Islam, UIU. This research grant was awarded by the North South University and United International University, Bangladesh in 2022 for the project "A Real-Time Approach to Identify Psychological Problems Unobtrusively Through Explainable Machine Learning Model" which is a part of Mon Majhi. I contributed to the grant application by writing the research proposal.
BDT 50,000. PI: Mohammad Abdul Hadi, EU (Currently, in UBC). This research grant was awarded by the Eastern University, Bangladesh in 2019 for the project "A holistic approach to perceive students’ academic result due to app usage" which is a part of Mon Majhi. I contributed to the grant application by writing the research proposal.

Figure: Map of Bangladesh presenting the living location of the participants of our study conducted in 2020 and 2021

Data Donation Process [Will be activated again in the near future. Not collecting currently.]

If you are interested in participating, please donate data through our app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.mn.u). In the app, you will find the consent form where we have mentioned explicitly what is the purpose of collecting data, what type of data our app will collect, how we will ensure the security of your data, etc. You may read the privacy policy available in our app description in Google Play Store which you may read from here also. You may take a look at our data safety policy from here.

Way to receive an incentive for your time to donate data

As there is no way to contact you by your donated data (i.e., you are completely anonymous), if you would like to receive an incentive, please, send your contact number through this Google Form (will be shared once we collect data again). You will receive an incentive between BDT 35 to BDT 50 (depending on the availability of funds) as many times as you will donate data. You can donate data after every 7 days.

Please, remember that even if you provide your contact number to receive the incentive, still, you will be completely anonymous in the data as there is no way to map your donated data with the contact number. In addition, there is an option (please, see question #3 of the form) to remove your contact number just after receiving the incentive.

Presentation

ACM MobileHCI'23
PervasiveHealth'22
PervasiveHealth'21
Asian CHI'21; A symposium of ACM CHI'21
IEEE TenSymp'20
ACM UbiComp/ISWC ’20 Adjunct (WellComp'20)
ACM SIGCHI Summer School 2020
ACM SIGCHI CSCW Asian Winter School 2020

Award

2nd Runner-up in research presentation competition, ACM SIGCHI Summer School 2020

Video: This recorded video shows the data donation process by our app. I thank Tanvir Hasan for the recording.

Figure: The frequency (not at all, several days, more than half the days, nearly everyday) of the appearance of different depressive symptoms in participants of the depressed group.

Figure: The frequency (not at all, several days, more than half the days, nearly everyday) of appearance of different depressive symptoms in participants of the non-depressed group.

Publications

Md Sabbir Ahmed, Tanvir Hasan, Salekul Islam, and Nova Ahmed. 2024. Investigating Rhythmicity in App Usage to Predict Depressive Symptoms: Protocol for Personalized Framework Development and Validation Through a Countrywide Study. JMIR Research Protocols [Paper].
Md. Sabbir Ahmed, Rahat Jahangir Rony, Mohammad Abdul Hadi, Ekram Hossain, and Nova Ahmed. 2023. A Minimalistic Approach to Predict and Understand the Relation of App Usage with Students’ Academic Performance. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (MHCI). [Paper]
Md. Sabbir Ahmed and Nova Ahmed. A Minimal and Faster System to Identify Depression Through Smartphone: An Explainable Machine Learning-Based Approach. JMIR Formative Research. [Paper]. Accepted at “Recent Break- through Results” session of IEEE-EMBS BHI’24].
Md. Sabbir Ahmed, Syeda Shabnam Khan, and Nova Ahmed. How Does App Usage Relate With Loneliness During COVID-19 Pandemic? An Exploratory Study Through Objectively Measured Data. EAI Endorsed Transactions on Pervasive Health and Technology. [Paper]
Md. Sabbir Ahmed and Nova Ahmed. 2022. Less Is More: Leveraging Digital Behavioral Markers for Real-Time Identification of Loneliness in Resource-Limited Settings. In Proceedings of 16th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare (PervasiveHealth’22) [Paper].
Md. Sabbir Ahmed, Tanvir Hasan, Md. Mahfuzur Rahman, and Nova Ahmed. 2022. A Rule Mining and Bayesian Network Analysis to Explore the Link Between Depression and Digital Behavioral Markers of Games App Usage. In Proceedings of 16th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare (PervasiveHealth’22)[Paper].
Md. Sabbir Ahmed and Nova Ahmed. 2021. Exploring Unique App Signature of the Depressed and Non-depressed Through Their Fingerprints on Apps. In Proceedings of 15th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare (PervasiveHealth’21). [Paper]
Md. Sabbir Ahmed, Rahat Jahangir Rony, and Nova Ahmed. 2021. Identifying High and Low Academic Result Holders Through Smartphone Usage Data. In Proceedings of Asian CHI Symposium’21; A symposium of ACM CHI'21. [Paper]
Md. Sabbir Ahmed, Rahat Jahangir Rony, Tanvir Hasan, and Nova Ahmed. 2020. Smartphone Usage Behavior Between Depressed and Non-Depressed Students. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2020 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and the 2020 International Symposium on Wearable Computers (UbiComp/ISWC ’20 Adjunct). [Paper]
Md. Sabbir Ahmed, Rahat Jahangir Rony, Md. Mahir Ashhab, and Nova Ahmed. 2020. An Empirical Study to Analyze the Impact of Instagram on Students’ Academic Results. In Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE Region 10 Symposium (TENSYMP’ 20). [Paper]

Research Ethics

We are committed to following research ethics. Our research is approved by the institution. You may take a look at our privacy policy and data safety policy also.

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to some researchers who helped us earlier in this project: Ekram Hossain, Mohammad Abdul Hadi, and Md Mahir Ashhab. Many thanks to Ekram Hossain who asked me in 2018 to check whether it is possible to retrieve apps' usage duration by a tool.

I thank all the participants for their time and data donation. I am grateful to my honorable teacher Prof. Md. Mahfuzur Rahman (Dean, Faculty of E&T, Eastern University) and Prof. Md. Abbas Ali Khan (Ex-Director, CRD, Eastern University) for their invaluable help in different stages of this project, particularly when we started the project in 2019. I also thank all of my other honorable teachers at Eastern University and beloved friends (specially Tanvir, Reaz, and Tushar) for supporting me a lot in the data collection phases. In addition, I am grateful to Prof. Oli Ahmed (University of Chittagong) for providing a translated loneliness scale with prompt and cordial support. I thank Prof. Arshad M. Chowdhury (Dean, School of Engineering, Brac University) for naming this project "Mon Majhi". I also thank Rashedul Amin Tuhin (Senior Lecturer, East West University) for his help in 2019 to prepare the terms and conditions. I am also thankful to Rahat Jahangir Rony.

Photos

I thank all of the photographers (particularly Tanvir Hasan) for capturing the moments.

With Reaz who supported a lot in the data collection phase of 2019. At Eastern University, Dhaka in 2019.

At Chittagong University of Engineering and Technology, Chattogram, during the data collection phase. [Decemer, 2022]

Travelling to Begum Rokeya University, Rangpur [February, 2023]

At United International University, Dhaka to talk with a psychotherapist about the research project. [2022]

At Pabna Mental Hospital to understand what we can do for the people staying here. [February, 2023]

At United International University, Dhaka to present project progress. [January, 2023]

At Patuakhali Science & Technology University, Patuakhali, during the data collection phase. [November, 2022]

At Begum Rokeya University, Rangpur, during the data collection phase. [February, 2023]

At Jatiya Kabi Kazi Nazrul Islam University, Mymensingh, during the data collection phase. [January, 2023]

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