CareNet: Linking Home-router Network Traffic to DSM-5 Depressive Behavior Indicators

Abstract: Digital mental-health sensing increasingly depends on mobile or wearable devices that require intrusive permissions and continuous user compliance. We present CareNet, a router-centric system that transforms household network metadata into interpretable behavioral indicators aligned with DSM-5 depressive-symptom domains. All processing occurs locally at the home gateway, preserving privacy while maintaining visibility of temporal routines. The core contribution is the Fuzzy Additive Symptom Likelihood (FASL), a transparent formulation that fuses header-level metrics into daily criterion-level likelihoods using bounded fuzzy memberships and additive aggregation. Combined with a DSM-style temporal gate, FASL integrates short-term traffic fluctuations into persistent, clinically interpretable indicators. Evaluation on realistic multi-day traces shows that CareNet captures characteristic patterns such as delayed sleep timing and attentional instability without payload inspection. The results highlight the feasibility of reproducible, explainable behavioral inference from router-side telemetry.