Speech pause time: A potential biomarker for depression detection

Detecting depression via speech is an attractive topic in recent years. Significant correlation was found between speech pause time and depressive severity. In the present study, 92 depressed patients and 92 age-, gender- and education level-matched control participants were examined to investigate three temporal characteristics of speech: recording time (RT), phonation time (PT) and speech pause time (SPT). The results show that depressed patients' duration measures are longer than healthy controls in most cases and spontaneous speech is better than automatic speech for these measures' acquisition. Among these three measures, although speech pause time could be influenced by antidepressant and interview topic, it is still an effective biomarker for depression.

[1]  George Mendelson,et al.  Book Reviews , 1995 .

[2]  Olga V. Demler,et al.  The epidemiology of major depressive disorder: results from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication (NCS-R). , 2003, JAMA.

[3]  M. Alpert,et al.  Reflections of depression in acoustic measures of the patient's speech. , 2001, Journal of affective disorders.

[4]  M. Harrow,et al.  PSYCHOMOTOR RETARDATION IN DEPRESSIVE SYNDROMES , 1967, The Journal of nervous and mental disease.

[5]  Bin Hu,et al.  EEG-based mild depressive detection using feature selection methods and classifiers , 2016, Comput. Methods Programs Biomed..

[6]  C. Bradshaw,et al.  Elongation of Pause-Time in Speech: A Simple, Objective Measure of Motor Retardation in Depression , 1976, British Journal of Psychiatry.

[7]  Wonyong Sung,et al.  A statistical model-based voice activity detection , 1999, IEEE Signal Processing Letters.

[8]  R. Reilly,et al.  Acoustic and temporal analysis of speech: A potential biomarker for schizophrenia. , 2010, Medical engineering & physics.

[9]  Å. Nilsonne.  Speech characteristics as indicators of depressive illness , 1988, Acta psychiatrica Scandinavica.

[10]  D. Mitchell Wilkes,et al.  Acoustical properties of speech as indicators of depression and suicidal risk , 2000, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

[11]  W. Low,et al.  Beck Depression Inventory (BDI): a reliability and validity test in the Malaysian urological population. , 2001, The Medical journal of Malaysia.

[12]  Michael Cannizzaro,et al.  Voice acoustical measurement of the severity of major depression , 2004, Brain and Cognition.

[13]  Hsiao-Hwa Chen,et al.  Ontology-based ubiquitous monitoring and treatment against depression , 2010, CMC 2010.

[14]  Mohammad H. Mahoor,et al.  Social risk and depression: Evidence from manual and automatic facial expression analysis , 2013, 2013 10th IEEE International Conference and Workshops on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG).

[15]  M. Landau.  Acoustical Properties of Speech as Indicators of Depression and Suicidal Risk , 2008 .

[16]  D. Kupfer,et al.  Interval between onset of sleep and rapid-eye-movement sleep as an indicator of depression. , 1972, Lancet.

[17]  B. Rovner,et al.  The Epidemiology of Major Depressive Disorder , 2003 .

[18]  Bin Hu,et al.  An EEG Based Pervasive Depression Detection for Females , 2012, ICPCA/SWS.

[19]  B. Carroll,et al.  Speech pause time: a marker of psychomotor retardation among endogenous depressives. , 1981, Biological psychiatry.

[20]  J. Mundt,et al.  Vocal Acoustic Biomarkers of Depression Severity and Treatment Response , 2012, Biological Psychiatry.

[21]  J. Mundt,et al.  Voice acoustic measures of depression severity and treatment response collected via interactive voice response (IVR) technology , 2007, Journal of Neurolinguistics.

[22]  D. Mitchell Wilkes,et al.  Investigation of vocal jitter and glottal flow spectrum as possible cues for depression and near-term suicidal risk , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

[23]  R. Spitzer,et al.  The PHQ-9: validity of a brief depression severity measure. , 2001, Journal of general internal medicine.

[24]  B. Carroll,et al.  Decrease in speech pause times with treatment of endogenous depression. , 1980, Biological psychiatry.

[25]  M. Hamilton.  A RATING SCALE FOR DEPRESSION , 1960, Journal of neurology, neurosurgery, and psychiatry.

[26]  Luo Yuejia,et al.  Revision of the Chinese Facial Affective Picture System , 2011 .

[27]  J. Mendlewicz,et al.  Speech Pause Time as a Method for the Evaluation of Psychomotor Retardation in Depressive Illness , 1985, British Journal of Psychiatry.

[28]  Emil Kraepelin,et al.  Manic-depressive insanity and paranoia , 1976 .

[29]  R Jouvent,et al.  Speech pause time and the retardation rating scale for depression (ERD). Towards a reciprocal validation. , 1984, Journal of affective disorders.

[30]  H H Stassen,et al.  Speaking behavior and voice sound characteristics in depressive patients during recovery. , 1993, Journal of psychiatric research.