Because the last one is what would seem to be implied, but I have a much simpler program, written in pure JavaScript, that is also 90% accurate at diagnosing Americans with depression: https://gist.github.com/osuushi/5297823
Since, according to the CDC[1], about 10% of Americans are depressed, my script will be accurate 90% of the time.
...well played.
http://schererstefan.net/assets/files/scherer_etal_FG2013.pd...
Still Eliza on steroids is pretty cool. Can't wait till they integrate it into emacs.
http://schererstefan.net/assets/files/scherer_etal_FG2013.pd...
If you interpret it as a measure of the tests sensitivity, then you're right 90% is pretty easy to beat!
If you interpret it as a measure of the tests specificity, then 90% accuracy is pretty darn good!
A little more accuracy would be nice, but then the title wouldn't be click-bait.
I like the idea though. Accurate depression test: Are you depressed? No. 93.3% accurate!
If not, we're at best talking about a magnitudinal thing or a probability thing. Like a Bayesian thing where each symptom's presence updates the probability of the person being depressed, which is turn based off of a database of previous cases of diagnosed depression and what symptoms they had.
But even that may be circular, ultimately. It could just as well be that depression is a vague category of similar symptoms that each come from a wide variety of scientific causes.
This is not to be mistaken for saying it doesn't exist or that it's all in someone's head - it's more just to say that if someone has depression, they have something that may deserve treatment and sensitivity, but that it's something that we still do not know exactly how to describe or diagnose, and so therefore we will just call it "depression" in the meantime. But what if we've sort of collectively forgotten the "in the meantime" part?
It depends a bit on what you mean. In the U.S. at least, diagnosis of depression is generally based on the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).[1] That lists a number of disorders that would be categorized under "depression", including "Major Depressive Disorder", "Dysthymia", and the catchily named "Depressive Disorder Not Otherwise Specified".
In the DSM, these disorders are all treated as syndromes, meaning they are defined entirely by symptoms. They may have organic causes (troubles with neurotransmitters, etc.), but the definition of each disorder does not address that issue. This is in contrast to something like influenza, which refers to a particular organic cause (infection by a certain kind of virus).
As for the actual definitions, they vary in how specific they are. Major Depressive Disorder is quite specific, requiring certain kinds of episodes to occur with specified frequencies and lengths. On the other end of the scale is DD-NOS, which is essentially defined as a depression-ish thing that doesn't fit into any of the other categories. (Okay, it's a little more precise than that, but, honestly, not much.)
> This is not to be mistaken for saying it doesn't exist or that it's all in someone's head - it's more just to say that if someone has depression, they have something that may deserve treatment and sensitivity, but that it's something that we still do not know exactly how to describe or diagnose, and so therefore we will just call it "depression" in the meantime.
I'd say that's pretty much on target. However, biology & biochemistry are proceeding forward at a breakneck pace these days. We do have some understanding of the causes for some kinds of depression, and this understanding seems to be improving significantly each year.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Man...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manu...
Worth a look if you're interested in how mental disorders are diagnosed.
Not everyone wants a pill for their un-normal quirks, yo.
I've also read that depressed people tend to have a more accurate picture of reality. Basically, happy people are walking Dunning-Kruger cases waiting to happen?
Im not sure I totally buy it - Im sure it can pick up the signs with 90% accuracy but how often do the signs actually correspond to a clinically depressed person. Just because your in a down mood at one moment does not mean you are depressed - depression is just a lot more complex than that. Im not sure that this would be of much use in accurate diagnosis although it seems like pretty interesting tech.
As someone with relatively mild depression, you'd never know it in normal conversation. But if you ask directly about symptoms and I give honest answers, both the answers themselves and my body language will probably give you a pretty good indication.
Second, where's the methodology.
Third, it's not the Kinect doing the diagnosing, it's the computer vision algorithm
http://schererstefan.net/assets/files/scherer_etal_FG2013.pd...
I've only skimmed it, but the vision work looks sound, and it looks like it makes pretty essential use of the depth map from the Kinect. But I don't think there's any speech recognition going on, so that part is just acting (from both the humans and the virtual platform). I'll bet an untrained user could get the system to break pretty quickly...
Neat proof of concept, though.
Reminds me of a certain someone asking another certain someone why he flipped a tortoise in the desert...
That's true, but nevertheless, using a widely-deployed hardware platform such as the Kinect makes it more interesting than the CV algorithm alone.
