Evaluating the utility of daily speech assessments for monitoring depression symptoms

Abstract

Objective Depression is a common mental health disorder and a major public health concern, significantly interfering with the lives of those affected. The complex clinical presentation of depression complicates symptom assessments. Day-to-day fluctuations of depression symptoms within an individual bring an additional barrier, since infrequent testing may not reveal symptom fluctuation. Digital measures such as speech can facilitate daily objective symptom evaluation. Here, we evaluated the effectiveness of daily speech assessment in characterizing speech fluctuations in the context of depression symptoms, which can be completed remotely, at a low cost and with relatively low administrative resources. Methods Community volunteers ( N = 16) completed a daily speech assessment, using the Winterlight Speech App, and Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) for 30 consecutive business days. We calculated 230 acoustic and 290 linguistic features from individual's speech and investigated their relationship to depression symptoms at the intra-individual level through repeated measures analyses. Results We observed that depression symptoms were linked to linguistic features, such as less frequent use of dominant and positive words. Greater depression symptomatology was also significantly correlated with acoustic features: reduced variability in speech intensity and increased jitter. Conclusions Our findings support the feasibility of using acoustic and linguistic features as a measure of depression symptoms and propose daily speech assessment as a tool for better characterization of symptom fluctuations.

Language and Mental Health: Measures of Emotion Dynamics from Text as Linguistic Biosocial Markers

“…Additionally, the depression group in the eRisk dataset also had significantly lower dominance compared to the control group. Osatuke et al, 2007;Gumus et al, 2023). While average emotion intensity is one of the more commonly explored measures, there is still relatively few works studying the relationships between arousal and dominance with mental health, compared to valence.…”

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“…To overcome these challenges and better capture intra-individual variation, our clinical team modified the PHQ-8 scale to a more nuanced continuous scale ranging from 0-100 (see Figure 2). The practice of re-scaling psychometric scales is not uncommon and has been applied to the PHQ in various past studies [29,48,50,54]. A standard PHQ-8 score of 10 or higher (out of 24) signifies major depression [44].…”

“…In our study, we adjusted each item's score on the PHQ-8 from its original 0-3 range to a broader 0-100 scale. As mentioned earlier, the practice of re-scaling psychometric scales is not uncommon and has been applied to the PHQ in various past studies [29,48,50,54]. However, one limitation of adapting the PHQ-8 to a 0-100 scale is the potential for inconsistencies when correlating these scores with established levels of depression severity.…”

Detecting bulbar amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) using automatic acoustic analysis

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