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Kinect can now be used to diagnose depression with 90% accuracy?

thescorpionthefrog.com

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Re: Kinect can now be used to diagnose depression with 90% accuracy?

#21

Post by rck »

a_bonobo wrote: post #18
rck wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like the research paper this is based on is here: 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 us…

Another thing is that this needs a properly trained interviewer, and it's not based on the Kinect's measurements alone but also on the questions asked (and the reaction is then measured). The behaviour of the interviewer is a great confounding factor in this. Reminds me of a certain someone asking another certain someone why he flipped a tortoise in the desert...

I think the problem isn't with the published paper - it looks like they used a trained human interviewer and recorded both humans to evaluate their descriptors. The real problem is with the PR video, which looks really impressive, but seriously oversells the capabilities of the system. Not that the problem is unique to this situation - I think a lot of the videos in AI oversell the research. It's a pity, because the research is usually very good, but by itself isn't "exciting enough for general consumption," so they add bells and whistles that have nothing to do with the science.

Re: Kinect can now be used to diagnose depression with 90% accuracy?

#22

Post by SilentStump »

stcredzero wrote: post #19
SilentStump wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I studied psych in college a few years back and read about a variety of studies on how individuals with slight-moderate depression respond to certain stimuli. One of the most interesting studies (unrelated to the topic) had to deal with individuals looking into a mirror after failing a task. Individuals with >= slight depression would look themselves in the eyes, while happily ignorant individuals would avoid eye con…

> They attributed this with a depressed person's desire to figure out what is wrong with themselves and internalize the failure, where as the happy people would avoid internalizing the failure. 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?

I believe I know the study you are referring to and you are sort of right. on a scale of accuracy, slightly depressed people are pretty accurate in self assessments, happy people tend to over exaggerate their abilities, and moderately-severely depressed individuals rate their abilities lower than their actual level. So if the person's average ability was a 5/10, happy people tended to rate themselves a 6/10 and moderately depressed people a 4/10 on average iirc.

Edit: My favorite example of Dunning-Kruger happens to be found in religion. The people that know God the most tend to talk about how little they know God, where as the proselytizers that claim the most to know God, really have no clue about the teachings of christ, mohammed, etc.

Re: Kinect can now be used to diagnose depression with 90% accuracy?

#23

Post by mistercow »

As usual, vague terms like "90% accuracy" are thrown around without specifying what exactly they mean. Is that a 10% false positive rate? A 10% false negative rate? 90% accuracy over a representative sample of the general population?

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.

[1] http://www.cdc.gov/features/dsdepression/

Re: Kinect can now be used to diagnose depression with 90% accuracy?

#24

Post by a_bonobo »

rck wrote: post #21
a_bonobo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thing is that this needs a properly trained interviewer, and it's not based on the Kinect's measurements alone but also on the questions asked (and the reaction is then measured). The behaviour of the interviewer is a great confounding factor in this. Reminds me of a certain someone asking another certain someone why he flipped a tortoise in the desert...

I think the problem isn't with the published paper - it looks like they used a trained human interviewer and recorded both humans to evaluate their descriptors. The real problem is with the PR video, which looks really impressive, but seriously oversells the capabilities of the system. Not that the problem is unique to this situation - I think a lot of the videos in AI oversell the research. It's a pity, because the…

You're right, posting the paper and not that blog-post would have led to a much more interesting discussion.

One of the strangest things in that SimSensei is the automated interviewer - when I talk to a recorded voice instead of a real person, I behave enormously different! Why should I fidget around in answering when no-one really listens anyway? Why should I give proper answers? Why should I exhibit signs of shame when I talk to no-one about myself?

This doesn't work like described in the paper.

Re: Kinect can now be used to diagnose depression with 90% accuracy?

#25

Post by barbs »

mistercow wrote: post #23

As usual, vague terms like "90% accuracy" are thrown around without specifying what exactly they mean. Is that a 10% false positive rate? A 10% false negative rate? 90% accuracy over a representative sample of the general population? 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: h…

> I have a much simpler program, written in pure JavaScript, that is also 90% accurate at Diagnosing Americans with depression

...well played.

Re: Kinect can now be used to diagnose depression with 90% accuracy?

#26

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

danso wrote: post #10

First of all, this is blog spam, and the OP has apparently never tried viewing their own site on a tablet. Second, where's the methodology. Third, it's not the Kinect doing the diagnosing, it's the computer vision algorithm

>Third, it's not the Kinect doing the diagnosing, it's the computer vision algorithm

That's true, but nevertheless, using a widely-deployed hardware platform such as the Kinect makes it more interesting than the CV algorithm alone.

Re: Kinect can now be used to diagnose depression with 90% accuracy?

#27

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

stcredzero wrote: post #20
ggchappell wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is interesting to me because... is there even a scientific definition of depression yet? Such that, if you have a defined list of symptoms, you are definitely depressed, and if you don't, you are definitely not depressed? 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 Disor…

What about correlations with patterns in MRI scans?

MRI's are expensive (in the US). Specialist mental health care is not covered under most standard health insurance plans. How about you just fill out the questionnaire[1], and we'll match you with a nice (newly patented) pill?

[1] http://www.depressedtest.com

See also: Questionable sponsorship of online depression tests.

http://www.policymed.com/2010/02/letters-from-grassley-quest...

Re: Kinect can now be used to diagnose depression with 90% accuracy?

#28

Post by ggchappell »

stcredzero wrote: post #20
ggchappell wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is interesting to me because... is there even a scientific definition of depression yet? Such that, if you have a defined list of symptoms, you are definitely depressed, and if you don't, you are definitely not depressed? 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 Disor…

What about correlations with patterns in MRI scans?

> What about correlations with patterns in MRI scans?

An excellent question, about which I know absolutely nothing.

Something to keep in mind, though: medical tests & whatnot are only useful insofar as they affect the way we handle treatment. Diagnosing depression really isn't that tough; if someone has a debilitating mood disorder, then it is reasonable to get them some kind of help. (I imagine that, for some of these people, the really hard problem is getting them to figure out they have troubles that the medical establishment can help with.)

So I don't think we need MRIs to tell whether someone is depressed. OTOH, can MRIs tell us what treatments are likely to be successful? That sounds like a very interesting question. Hopefully, someone is looking into it.

Re: Kinect can now be used to diagnose depression with 90% accuracy?

#29

Post by eric970 »

If it's as accurate as the team says it is, this is pretty astounding IMO. They'd have to be capturing some sort of baseline in the beginning of the conversation, and recording relative shifts of variables (ie; smile, eye shift/location) to come up with how "depressed" the person is. Just writing some software that says "oh this person is looking down" probably wouldn't cut it-- because shy people look down too. I noticed in the demo it seemed as if it started monitoring these things after certain questions were asked, which would be the correct way to measure a shift from baseline. Elicit a predictable period of what could be change and record.
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