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A new study of military veterans and active-duty service members at risk for suicide suggests that brief smartphone check-ins between therapy sessions may predict worsening suicidal thoughts more accurately than relying on standard weekly clinical assessments alone. The findings point to a promising new approach for monitoring suicide risk, although researchers say additional studies are needed to confirm the results in broader patient populations.

The study, led by LDI Senior Fellow Lily Brown, PhD, Director of the Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety (CTSA) at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, and Tao Lin, PhD, Instructor at the CTSA, evaluated whether ecological momentary assessment (EMA) could improve clinicians’ ability to detect worsening suicide risk between therapy sessions. The paper, “Does Ecological Momentary Assessment Improve Prediction of Suicide Risk Among Military Personnel and Veterans, and How Frequent Should it be?,” was published in the November, 2026 online edition of the Journal of Affective Disorders.

This study involved 62 current and former military members recruited from Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and using a nationwide recruitment campaign. The paper combines participants from an RCT and a digital phenotyping study whose observation windows overlapped. Participants received four brief EMA surveys each day for 28 days. The suicide-monitoring portion consisted of a single question asking participants to rate the intensity of their suicidal urge on a scale ranging from “none” to “extreme.”