Using Voice Data to Facilitate Depression Risk Assessment in Primary Health Care

Voice-only telehealth is often more practical for lower-income patients who may lack stable internet connections. Thus, our study focused on using voice data to predict depression risk. The objectives were to: 1) Collect voice data from 24 people (12 with depression and 12 without mental health or major health condition diagnoses); 2) Build a machine learning model to predict depression risk. TPOT, an autoML tool, was used to select the best machine learning algorithm, which was the K-nearest neighbors classifier. The selected model had high performance in classifying depression risk (Precision: 0.98, Recall: 0.93, F1-Score: 0.96), compared to previous models. These findings may lead to a range of tools to help screen for and treat depression.