From the physical keys on our laptops to the software buttons on our smartphones, most of us rely on keyboards as the primary way of entering data into the digital world. But it turns out that our keyboards can also tell us quite a bit about ourselves, detecting when we’re tired, drunk, and even when we’re showing early signs of neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease—perhaps years before more recognizable symptoms surface.

Researchers at the Madrid-MIT M+Visión Consortium, a network dedicating to healthcare innovation in Madrid, are gathering and analyzing the keystrokes of volunteers with software and studying the patterns that emerge through machine learning. Individual typing patterns have already been used to identify individuals; some banks have used them to increase security when logging into accounts. But according to a soon-to-be-published paper in Scientific Reports, the M+Visión team was able to take the same typing data, combined with pattern recognition techniques, to distinguish between typing done when fully rested and when volunteers were tasked to type when woken up in the night. That data could also be used to detect neurological conditions much earlier than existing methods.

To be clear, the team is only gathering information about the timing of key presses, not which keys are being pressed. The researchers developed software that could be applied to a web browser to track how long a typist holds down each key. There’s no need to use specialized keyboards, and little cause for privacy concerns. In fact, many third-party smartphone keyboards gather much more data about what we type.

But it’s clear from the group’s work that we leave behind a trove of information when we interact with electronic devices in our daily lives.

“Every time we touch something that has a microprocessor in it, the microprocessor is able to measure the timing with sub-millisecond accuracy,” Luca Giancardo, a M+Vision fellow and the paper’s first author says. “You can get potential information from a microwave, but changing the software in a microwave is much harder.”

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