A group of researchers at Dartmouth say they have made the first smartphone app that blends AI with software for processing facial images. To correctly detect the start of depression before the person concerned even realises something is wrong.
You can use the front camera on your phone to regularly record your surroundings and facial emotions with the MoodCapture app. After that, the pictures are looked at to see if there are any clinical signs of sadness. In a test with 177 people who were diagnosed with major depressive disorder, the app correctly identified early signs of sadness 75% of the time.
The corresponding author of the study, Andrew Campbell, said
For the first time, pictures taken “in the wild” have been used to identify depression.
Face recognition technology, deep learning, and AI devices are all used in a similar way by MoodCapture. “When someone unlocks their phone, MoodCapture knows how their depression works and can tell them to get help.”
Every time a user unlocks their phone, MoodCapture is supposed to look at a set of pictures and rate them in real time. The AI model finds connections between facial expressions and things like eye contact, changes in facial expression, and a person’s surroundings that show these things are important for figuring out how depressed someone is.
In a statement, Jacobson, who runs the AIM HIGH Laboratory for AI and Mental Health, said,
“Our goal is to record the changes in symptoms that people with depression experience in their daily lives.”
In a perfect world, Jacobson says, an AI programme like MoodCapture should tell people not to get depressed. Instead, tell them to do something constructive, like calling a friend or going for a walk outside.
The work was made possible by a grant from the National Institutes of Mental Health that Jacobson is in charge of. The grant is looking into how deep learning and passive data collection can be used to find depressive signs in real time. It also builds on a study that Campbell’s lab did in 2012, in which the phones of Dartmouth students were used to collect automatic and idle data. To find out how their mental health is.
