Towards early detection of depression through smartphone sensing

Major depressive disorder is a complex and common mental health disorder that is heterogeneous and varies between individuals. Predictive measures have previously been used to predict depression in individuals. Given the complexity, heterogeneity of major depressive disorder in individuals, and the scarcity of labelled objective depressive behavioural data, predictive measures have shown limited applicability in detecting the early onset of depression. We present a developed system that collects similar smartphone sensor data like in previous predictive analysis studies. We discuss that anomaly detection and entropy analysis methods are best suited for developing new metrics for the early detection of the onset and progression of major depressive disorder.