Artificial Intelligence Against Autumn Depression

Sad and depressed mood, drowsiness,a sharp decrease in activity, a desire for loneliness – All these signs signal that autumn depression has reached the brain and body. A person does not immediately understand the reason for his sluggish mood, unlike artificial intelligence, developed in collaboration with psychiatrists, engineers and programmers.

Artificial Intelligence Is Not Depressed

A regular smartphone is already equipped with the necessary functionality for collecting data about a person’s emotional state. accelerometer,camera, microphone, keyboard (touch orkeyboard) GPS navigator is enough for this purpose. The process of obtaining information does not look like a separate procedure, similar to a reception by a psychiatrist. Gadgets accept voice or print requests of a person in everyday life, save information about body movements and send various types of data for AI processing:

• Speed ​​and manner of typing. With depression, most people reduce typing speed, but more importantly, how a person presses the buttons. The elusive at first glance aspects of typing and mouse scrolling speak of important cognitive traits and affective states. For example, with depression, the delay between pressing the spacebar and entering a character or the interval between scrolling and clicking changes.
• Voice tonality, frequency and volume of speech are compared with previous indicators to determine mood.
• Number of repeated words. For example, repeated repetition of the word “I” indicates that a person may become more depressed.
• The accelerometer counts the number of steps and determines slowness in movement by comparing current indicators and previous ones (for a week, month, year). 
• GPS Navigation Detects Limited Setaction. If previously the owner of the device often visited the gym, various events or met with friends, then in a state of depression, he sharply reduces the range of places visited, leaving only the necessary (work, supermarket).
• Heart rate without a smartwatchcan even be determined by the camera via perfusion analysis − blood supply to organs in natural conditions (in this case, the face is analyzed). A rapid pulse is one of the possible signs of depression.
• The camera compares blurry posture data with previous data. AI's attention is drawn to drooping shoulders, posture in the form of a question.
• Activity on social networks (the number of posts and correspondence with friends is reduced). Instead, it goes over to the usual paging of news feeds for the sake of killing time.
• Everything can be analyzed − even the genre of films and TV series chosen for viewing.

There are different AI-based systems fordiagnostics of mental disorders, but scientists from the Indian Institute of Technology Patna and the University of Caen in Normandy are currently doing the best job of this task. They created a program that determines the depth of depression 8% better than other developments.

This whole process is called compiling a digital human phenotype – a set of internal and external characteristics of a person, translated into digital format.

Digital phenotyping

Collecting data about a person raises an ethical question,After all, not everyone agrees with such supervision. In this case, you must prohibit the collection of data about yourself in different settings or use tools like Google Takeout. Thus, a person refuses to constantly observe the all-seeing digital eye and loses a lot of advantages, including compiling his own digital phenotype.

With this clinical toola complete human prototype is created in digital format. Sharp deviations from the norm in the behavior of this prototype can signal health problems, sound the alarm in case of disappearance, offer a solution to problems, including treatment for depression. Each person is individual, so the same symptoms do not necessarily indicate the same disease. For this, AI compares the current prototype not only with a healthy person, but also with previous indicators of the owner of the gadget.

Processing all the data instantly, a smart column can advise the owner of the gadget to seek help, passing along the information about the nearest clinic.

The advantage of this tool over standard onesThe psychologist's tests are about honesty, because the patient does not always tell the truth to the doctor and in many cases does not even know or remember all the symptoms that the disease exhibited. 

At the moment, digital phenotyping is stillpoorly developed, but in the next decade, this tool should penetrate into clinics, hospitals and other medical institutions. Clients will consent to doctors' access to their own digital phenotype, which will significantly expand the history of the disease and help establish the correct diagnosis and treatment methods.