Speech-based Evaluation of Emotions-Depression Correlation

Early detection of depression symptoms is fundamental to limit the onset of further associated behavioural disorders, such as psychomotor or social withdrawal. The combination of Artificial Intelligence and speech analysis revealed the existence of objectively measurable physical manifestations for early detection of depressive symptoms, constituting a valid support to evaluate these signals. To push forward the research state-of-art, this aim of this paper is to understand quantitative correlations between emotional states and depression by proposing a study across different datasets containing speech of both depressed/non-depressed people and emotional-related samples. The relationship between affective measures and depression can, in fact, a support to evaluate the presence of depression state. This work constitutes a preliminary step of a study whose final aim is to pursue AI-powered personalized medicine by building sophisticated Clinical Decision Support Systems for depression, as well as other psychological disorders.