An Attempt to Estimate Depressive Status from Voice

In the whole world especially developed countries, increasing mental health disorders is a serious problem. As a countermeasure, the main objective of this paper is an attempt to estimate depressive status from voice. In this study, we gathered patients with major depressive disorders in the hospital’s consulting room. Several questionnaires including “the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale” (HAM-D) were administered to evaluate the patients’ depressed state. Voices corresponding to three long vowels were recorded from the subjects. Next, the acoustic feature quantity was calculated based on the voice. We developed the HAM-D score estimation algorithm from the voice using one of three types of long vowel audio content. As a result, there was a correlation between the “Actual HAM-D Score” and the “Estimated HAM-D Score”. We found that the algorithm is effective in estimating depression state and can be used for estimating the disease state based on voice.