[Legacy Report] What the Face and Voice Reveal: Developing a Diagnostic Aid for Major Depression

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Depression and other mood disorders are common and disabling disorders. Their impact on individuals and families is profound. The WHO Global Burden of Disease reports quantify depression as the leading cause of disability world-wide. Despite the high prevalence, current clinical practice depends almost exclusively on self-report and clinical opinion, risking a range of subjective biases. There currently exist no laboratory-based measures of illness expression, course and recovery, and no objective markers of end-points for interventions in both clinical and research settings. In this talk, I will present an overview of a project to develop affective sensing technology that supports clinicians in the diagnosis and monitoring of treatment progress. This technology is based on a multimodal analysis of facial expressions and movements, body posture, head movements as well as vocal expressions. Results from a recently completed pilot study in this collaborative project with the Black Dog Institute (Sydney), University of New South Wales and the Queensland Institute of Medical Research (Brisbane) demonstrated that this approach can achieve over 90% agreement with clinical assessment, an encouraging result to continue this research.

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