EYE MOVEMENT ANALYSIS FOR DEPRESSION DETECTION

Depression is a common and disabling mental health disorder, which impacts not only on the sufferer but also on their families, friends and the economy overall. Despite its high prevalence, current diagnosis relies almost exclusively on patient self-report and clinical opinion, leading to a number of subjective biases. Our aim is to develop an objective affective sensing system that supports clinicians in their diagnosis and monitoring of clinical depression. In this paper, we analyse the performance of eye movement features extracted from face videos using Active Appearance Models for a binary classifica-tion task (depressed vs. non-depressed). We find that eye movement low-level features gave 70 % accuracy using a hybrid classifier of Gaussian Mixture Models and Support Vector Machines, and 75% accuracy when using statistical measures with SVM classifiers over the entire interview. We also investigate differences while express-ing positive and negative emotions, as well as the classification per-formance in gender-dependent versus gender- independent modes. Interestingly, even though the blinking rate was not significantly dif-ferent between depressed and healthy controls, we find that the aver-age distance between the eyelids (‘eye opening’) was significantly smaller and the average duration of blinks significantly longer in depressed subjects, which might be an indication of fatigue or eye contact avoidance. Index Terms — Eye movement, active appearance model, shape analysis, affective sensing 1