Towards multi-modal anticipatory monitoring of depressive states through the analysis of human-smartphone interaction

Remarkable advances in smartphone technology, especially in terms of passive sensing, have enabled researchers to passively monitor user behavior in real-time and at a granularity that was not possible just a few years ago. Recently, different approaches have been proposed to investigate the use of different sensing and phone interaction features, including location, call, SMS and overall application usage logs, to infer the depressive state of users. In this paper, we propose an approach for monitoring of depressive states using multi-modal sensing via smartphones. Through a brief literature review we show the sensing modalities that have been exploited in the past studies for monitoring depression. We then present the initial results of an ongoing study to demonstrate the association of depressive states with the smartphone interaction features. Finally, we discuss the challenges in predicting depression through multimodal mobile sensing.