Large-scale Automatic Depression Screening Using Meta-data from WiFi Infrastructure

Depression is a serious public health problem. Current diagnosis techniques rely on physician-administered or patient self-administered interview tools, which are burdensome and suffer from recall bias. Recent studies have proposed new approaches that use sensing data collected on smartphones to serve as "human sensors" for automatic depression screening. These approaches, however, require running an app on the phones for continuous data collection. We explore a novel approach that uses data collected from WiFi infrastructure for large-scale automatic depression screening. Specifically, when smartphones connect to a WiFi network, their locations (and hence the locations of the users) can be determined by the access points that they associate with; the location information over time provides important insights into the behavior of the users, which can be used for depression screening. To investigate the feasibility of this approach, we have analyzed two datasets, each collected over several months, involving tens of participants recruited from a university. Our results demonstrate that WiFi meta-data is effective for passive depression screening: the F1 scores are as high as 0.85 for predicting depression, comparable to those obtained by using sensing data collected directly from smartphones.