Publications & posters

Depression is a common mental health disorder and a major public health concern, significantly interfering with the lives of those affected. DIGITAL HEALTH recently published a paper on “Evaluating the utility of daily speech assessments for monitoring depression symptoms” by Winterlight Labs.

Here we summarise the key takeaways from this paper.

Key points

• Using the Winterlight App, we show the feasibility of daily speech assessments in monitoring depression symptoms.
• Daily speech assessment can be used as a remote digital tool to capture the day-to-day depression symptom fluctuations.
• Changes to the voice and reduced positive words in a daily voice diary relate to more self-reported depression symptoms.

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.

These results propose daily speech assessment as a tool for better characterization of symptom fluctuations.