Depression is a common illness worldwide, affecting an estimated 3.8% of the population, including 5% of all adults, in particular, 5.7% of adults over 60 years of age. Unfortunately, at present, the ways to evaluate different mental disorders, like the Montgomery-Åsberg depression rating scale (MADRS) and observations, need a great effort, on part of specialists due to the lack of availability of patients to obtain the necessary information to know their conditions and to detect illness such as depression in an objective way. Based on data analysis and artificial intelligence techniques, like Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), it is possible to classify a person, from the mental status examination, into two classes. Moreover, it is beneficial to observe how the data of these two classes are similar in different time intervals. In this study, a motor activity database was used, from which the readings of 55 subjects of study (32 healthy and 23 with some degree of depression) were recorded with a small wrist-worn accelerometer to detect the peak amplitude of movement acceleration and generate a transient voltage signal proportional to the rate of acceleration. Motor activity data were selected per patient in time-lapses of one day for seven days (one week) in one-minute intervals. The data were pre-processed to be given to a two-dimensional convolutional network (2D-CNN), where each record of motor activity per minute was represented as a pixel of an image. The proposed model is capable of detecting depression in real-time (if this is implemented in a mobile device such as a smartwatch) with low computational cost and accuracy of 76.72% In summary, the model shows promising abilities to detect possible cases of depression, providing a helpful resource to identify the condition and be able to take the appropriate follow-up for the patient.
Keywords: artificial intelligence; convolutional neural network; depression; depressive episodes; motor activity.