Digital phenotyping of the mind: From biology to psychoinformatics

Scientists and engineers in psychoinformatics are developing new ways to capture changes in mental conditions through data generated from people’s interaction with digital devices, especially smartphones. This new approach is called digital phenotyping . It draws on evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’ notion of the extended phenotype . However, there is surprisingly little biological thinking in the literature on digital phenotyping of the mind. This article pursues an epistemic critique of digital phenotyping of the mind through an ‘infrastructural inversion’ based on a material-discursive reconstruction. It rereads Dawkin’s work on the extended phenotype. It traces the emergence of a correlational psychology and of psychometric instruments used to validate extended digital phenotypes of mind and behaviour. Alternative ontologies of mental health and disorder are presented to challenge the medical model embedded in current international classifications of mental and behavioural diseases. Digital phenotyping of the mind may be in danger of just reproducing an already problematic medical model when the deeper theoretical background assumptions concerning causality and reverse inference are not properly addressed.