Detecting Depression in Less Than 10 Seconds: Impact of Speaking Time on Depression Detection Sensitivity

This article investigates whether it is possible to detect depression using less than 10 seconds of speech. The experiments have involved 59 participants (including 29 that have been diagnosed with depression by a professional psychiatrist) and are based on a multimodal approach that jointly models linguistic (what people say) and acoustic (how people say it) aspects of speech using four different strategies for the fusion of multiple data streams. On average, every interview has lasted for 242.2 seconds, but the results show that 10 seconds or less are sufficient to achieve the same level of recall (roughly 70%) observed after using the entire inteview of every participant. In other words, it is possible to maintain the same level of sensitivity (the name of recall in clinical settings) while reducing by 95%, on average, the amount of time requireed to collect the necessary data.