Now, in her second year at UVM, Loftness is refining another engineered health tool to identify other adverse conditions that often go undetected: anxiety and depression in young children. Young children may not have the vocabulary or ability to communicate problems to caregivers who might be able to help. That’s the idea behind Loftness’s project, “Discovering Digital Phenotypes of Childhood Internalizing Disorders for Point-of-Care Diagnostics.” Her work builds on that of her faculty mentors at UVM, Ryan McGinnis, Karl and Mary Fessenden Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and Ellen McGinnis, assistant professor of psychiatry, to identify the biomarkers associated with internalizing orders in young children. During a therapy session with a five-year-old McGinnis suspected was depressed, she learned there were no existing tools to identify anxiety disorders in young kids. The field of psychology has generally not examined the mental health of young children. It hasn’t really considered anxiety and depression something that young children experience, McGinnis explains. Perhaps flagging children earlier will help drive cases down by giving caregivers of children the information to them develop lifelong coping skills.

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