A university has unveiled plans to start reading its students’ social media posts to work out whether they are getting depressed.
The University of Buckingham said it will monitor the text of posts on networks like Facebook and Twitter and use the resultant “big data” to calculate students’ moods.
Algorithms could then prompt university officials to intervene if they believe that a student is unwell.
Sir Anthony Seldon, the university’s vice-chancellor (pictured above), suggested the scheme could ultimately stop depressed students killing themselves.
Speaking to Britain’s i newspaper, he said the scheme would help make Buckingham Europe’s first “positive” university.
Sir Anthony said the system would work on an opt-in basis.
He added that it would deal with the problem of students being unable to cope with the demands of living alone, like figuring out when to eat and sleep:
The transition from school and university is not well-handled. We assume students finish their A-levels, they have a 10 week summer holiday then something magical happens and they can cope with living away from home.
Suddenly they can manage their own food intake, their sleep, exercise, they can manage their own finances, laundry and bedtime. They can manage when a relationship breaks up and when they have depression or anxiety attacks and of course they can’t.
He cited statistics that 140 British students a year kill themselves at university, and implied that his monitoring system might help solve that.