On June 4, 2026, the Digital Health Measurement Collaborative Community (DATAcc) by the Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) released a new core set of digital measures intended to cultivate shared standards for the use of digital sensing in mental health research and care. 

The measures set and accompanying resources are the product of a nine-month collaborative effort involving 28 organizations specializing in digital mental health, including the UCLA Depression Grand Challenge. The project builds on several years of activity and collaboration to advance the use of digital sensing technologies in mental health research, catalyzed by the 2023 UCLA Digital Sensing Workshop, which convened researchers, industry experts, advocates and funders to identify shared priorities for the field.

The selected measures comprise behavioral and physiological signals — such as heart rate, sleep quantity, facial expression, and speech patterns — that can be captured by digital sensors found in everyday devices such as smartphones and smartwatches. These were identified for their relationship to symptoms and features of common mental health disorders, including depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. 

“Working collectively to establish standards in the relatively nascent field of digital sensing for mental health is critical to advancing understanding and making new discoveries,” said DGC Director Nelson Freimer, MD. “Shared, consistent approaches to collecting and interpreting data from digital sensors will mean findings can be more easily compared, synthesized, and used to build a stronger evidence base for future mental health research and care. 

“The DGC team is proud to continue pushing the field forward through field-shaping collaborations like this one, as well through as our own research portfolio, where we’ve just kicked off the first DGC study integrating digital sensing with treatment.” 

To view the full measures set and accompanying resources, visit the DiMe website.