Depression and Severity Detection Based on Body Kinematic Features: Using Kinect Recorded Skeleton Data of Simple Action

Relative limb movement is an important feature in assessing depression. In this study, we looked into whether a skeleton-mimetic task using natural stimuli may help people recognize depression. We innovatively used Kinect V2 to collect participant data. Sequential skeletal data was directly extracted from the original Kinect-3D and tetrad coordinates of the participant's 25 body joints. Two constructed skeletal datasets of whole-body joints (including binary classification and multi classification) were input into the proposed model for depression recognition after data preparation. We improved the temporal convolution network (TCN), creating novel spatial attention dilated TCN (SATCN) network that included a hierarchy of temporal convolution groups with different dilated convolution scales to capture important skeletal features and a spatial attention block for final result prediction. The depression and non-depression groups can be classified automatically with a maximum accuracy of 75.8% in the binary classification task, and 64.3% accuracy in the multi classification dataset to recognize more fine-grained identification of depression severity, according to experimental results. Our experiments and methods based on Kinect V2 can not only identify and screen depression patients but also effectively observe the recovery level of depression patients during the recovery process. For example, in the change from severe depression to moderate or mild depression multi classification dataset.

Automated summary

In this study, we used the Kinect V2 to collect skeletal data and proposed a novel spatial attention dilated TCN network for depression recognition. Our experiments and methods based on Kinect V2 not only identified and classified depression patients accurately but also observed the recovery level of depression patients during the recovery process.