Alexander Russell

Depression is a serious mental illness. The current best guideline in depression treatment is closely monitoring patients and adjusting treatment as needed. Close monitoring of patients through physician-administered follow-ups or self-administered questionnaires, however, is difficult in clinical settings due to high cost, lack of trained professionals, and burden to the patients. Sensory data collected from mobile devices has been shown to provide a promising direction for long-term monitoring of depression symptoms. Most existing studies in this direction, however, focus on depression detection; the few studies that are on predicting changes in depression are not in clinical settings. In this paper, we investigate using one type of sensory data, sleep data, collected from wearables to predict improvement of depression symptoms over time after a patient initiates a new pharmacological treatment. We apply sleep trend filtering to noisy sleep sensory data to extract high-level sleep characteristics and develop a family of machine learning models that use simple sleep features (mean and variation of sleep duration) to predict symptom improvement. Our results show that using such simple sleep features can already lead to validation F1 score up to 0.68, indicating that using sensory data for predicting depression improvement during treatment is a promising direction.