An Ambient Intelligence-based Approach For Longitudinal Monitoring of Verbal and Vocal Depression Symptoms

Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology can aid in the detection, monitoring, and assessment of depressive symptoms in individuals. ASR systems have been used as a tool to analyze speech patterns and characteristics that are indicative of depression. Depression affects not only a person's mood but also their speech patterns. Individuals with depression may exhibit changes in speech, such as slower speech rate, longer pauses, reduced pitch variability, and decreased overall speech fluency. Despite the growing use of machine learning in diagnosing depression, there is a lack of studies addressing the issue of relapse. Furthermore, previous research on relapse prediction has primarily focused on clinical variables and has not taken into account other factors such as verbal and non-verbal cues. Another major challenge in depression relapse research is the scarcity of publicly available datasets. To overcome these issues, we propose a one-shot learning framework for detecting depression relapse from speech. We define depression relapse as the similarity between the speech audio and textual encoding of a subject and that of a depressed individual. To detect depression relapse based on this definition, we employ a Siamese neural network that models the similarity between of two instances. Our proposed approach shows promising results and represents a new advancement in the field of automatic depression relapse detection and mental disorders monitoring.