Depression takes two steps

Schematic diagram of the experimental scene Photo courtesy of respondents

Depression can be reflected in the gaitpainted by Zhang Shuanghu

Depression is a very common mental illness.

Recently, the research team of Zhu Tingshao, a researcher at the Key Laboratory of Behavioral Sciences of the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, found through gait behavior data analysis that depression can be reflected in gait.

Diagnosis problem

With the rapid economic and social development, people's life rhythm and work pressure have increased significantly, and the number of people with psychological and behavioral problems and mental disorders in my country has been increasing.

In September last year, the National Health Commission issued the "Working Plan for Exploring Special Services for the Prevention and Treatment of Depression", requiring high schools and institutions of higher learning to incorporate depression screening into student health examinations, and pay special attention to students with abnormal evaluation results.

Incorporating depression screening into the health checkup is to increase screening and assess the mental health status, just to find groups that are prone to depression more timely and earlier, and to intervene and treat as soon as the depression just emerges.

"There are strict standards for the clinical diagnosis of depression.

The attending physician Tong Liang of the Yunnan Provincial Psychiatric Hospital also said, “Depression cannot be diagnosed by instruments.

Statistics show that there are currently less than 40,000 psychiatrists in my country.

"The diagnosis of depression mainly depends on the diagnosis of doctors, but the number of specialists is insufficient.

Effective model

"Studies have shown that the brain neural network involved in individual posture control is also closely related to depression.

When designing the experiment, the researchers unexpectedly discovered that the Microsoft Kinect intelligent somatosensory device can capture the three-dimensional coordinate changes of 25 body joints of the human body at a sampling rate of 30 Hz.

The study recruited a total of 126 depression patients and 121 healthy people.

The researcher preprocessed the collected data, first segmented the data, intercepted the data of 2 gait cycles when each subject was walking facing the Kinect intelligent somatosensory device, the purpose is to eliminate the low computational efficiency caused by a large amount of repeated data And the problem of data redundancy; then use low-pass filters to denoise the data of 25 body joints.

The results of multiple logistic regression analysis showed that kinematics, time domain and frequency domain features can explain the variability of the dependent variable (depression) by 12.

"These data show that depression can be reflected in gait, and different types of gait features have different contributions to depression recognition.

 Improve screening efficiency

Researchers believe that, compared with traditional psychometric methods, this method of depression recognition based on gait data has the characteristics of non-intrusiveness, retrospectiveness, and automation.

"This kind of objective data is more convenient for users.
" Zhu Tingshao said, "Because there is no need for huge equipment and no complicated operations, the results can be obtained by only a few steps.
"

Zhu Tingshao believes that, in principle, during large-scale screening, for example, a certain space is set aside in a hospital, and a 3D camera (with three-dimensional recognition function) is installed.
Participants can walk for a minute or two from a short road.
You can use gait to identify whether he is prone to depression.
This method can even be used in schools, factories, nursing homes and even families to screen and early warning of internal members' depression tendency.

"From the results of our own experiments, it can reach a correlation above the medium level.
That is to say, it can be applied in practice, and the screening results have a certain parametric value.
" Zhu Tingshao said, "This kind of walking posture and body posture recognition The advantage is that it can detect early depression.
The earlier depression is detected, the better it will be for treatment and recovery.
"

The hardware device of the auxiliary diagnosis system has only one camera with depth information.
This kind of camera is easy to buy on the market, and the price is not expensive.
At the same time, with the analysis program, the analysis program can directly read the results from the computer, or it can be used as a mobile phone App.

"Currently, some brands of mobile phones also have 3D cameras.
As long as the mobile phone has sufficient computing power, it can be used for self-checking at home.
" Zhu Tingshao also emphasized, "This method can be used as an auxiliary diagnosis and can be easily and efficiently screened.
Or self-examination, but it is not a substitute for a doctor’s diagnosis.
If you find that there is a possibility of depression, you must go to a specialist for diagnosis and treatment.
” (Source: Zhang Shuanghu, China Science News)

Related paper information: org/10.
3389/fpsyt.
2021.
661213" target="_blank">https://doi.
org/10.
3389/fpsyt.
2021.
661213