The dawn of tappigraphy: does your smartphone know how you feel before you do?

Tech companies are seeking to analyse data on the way we tap, scroll, text and call to monitor our mental health - with potential consequences for privacy and healthcare

We all fear our smartphones spy on us, and I'm subject to a new type of surveillance. An app called TapCounter records each time I touch my phone's screen. My swipes and jabs are averaging about 1,000 a day, though I notice that's falling as I steer shy of social media to meet my deadline. The European company behind it, QuantActions, promises that through capturing and analysing the data it will be able to detect important indicators related to mental/neurological health".

Arko Ghosh is the company's cofounder and a neuroscientist at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Tappigraphy patterns" - the time series of my touches - can, he says, confidently be used not only to infer slumber habits (tapping in the wee hours means you are not sleeping) but also mental performance level (the small intervals in a series of key-presses represent a proxy for reaction time), and he has published work to support it.