A novel multi-modal depression detection approach based on mobile crowd sensing and task-based mechanisms

Depression has become a global concern, and COVID-19 also has caused a big surge in its incidence. Broadly, there are two primary methods of detecting depression: Task-based and Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) based methods. These two approaches, when integrated, can complement each other. This paper proposes a novel approach for depression detection that combines real-time MCS and task-based mechanisms. We aim to design an end-to-end machine learning pipeline, which involves multimodal data collection, feature extraction, feature selection, fusion, and classification to distinguish between depressed and non-depressed subjects. For this purpose, we created a real-world dataset of depressed and non-depressed subjects. We experimented with: various features from multi-modalities, feature selection techniques, fused features, and machine learning classifiers such as Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machines (SVM), etc. for classification. Our findings suggest that combining features from multiple modalities perform better than any single data modality, and the best classification accuracy is achieved when features from all three data modalities are fused. Feature selection method based on Pearson's correlation coefficients improved the accuracy in comparison with other methods. Also, SVM yielded the best accuracy of 86%. Our proposed approach was also applied on benchmarking dataset, and results demonstrated that the multimodal approach is advantageous in performance with state-of-the-art depression recognition techniques.