Are New Apps For Monitoring Health Great?

By Vijoy V  |   Submitted On November 04, 2014

There are chances of apps becoming your new and latest digital therapist. Researchers from all over the world are developing programs which could analyze the given mood of an individual based on the given fluctuation in the voice. Currently, researchers and scientists from the University of Maryland have developed one such app. This app is based on the basic condition that each voice or the vocal feature differs as and when the patient gets depressed.

Most people are not aware of the inverse relationship our voice has with our mood.

The researchers have already planned to present the given research at international podiums in the coming months. Basically, this particular program is created in order to have a more effective and standard means of treatment for depression which does not rely on the simple patient-reported or simple symptoms of clinical analysis. While such standard procedures are indeed effective and significant for effective diagnosing and screening severity, but still there lies a margin for error.

For some time, various doctors and physicians all over the world are trying to emphasize the significance of the physiologically related means of depression. Talking and speaking has been known as the physiological biomarker in analyzing depression and sadness. There have been studies in the past which have shown a great amount of variation in the loudness, pitch, clarity, etc of the speech of individuals after and before the treatment imposed on them. To corroborate their studies and get a clear picture of the how speech can be a measuring tool for depression, scientists started to look in to the findings and observations of the past studies.

The scientist were able to find out that in the earlier studies, the depression level of each of the patients was analyzed and taken note of each week. This was done by using the Hamilton Depression Scale which is just a standard and normal evaluation tool to find out the range of depression. Certain researchers in Maryland did an analyzed study on the data of six random patients who took part in the experiment in 2007. The study showed that for some days the patients were quite depressed while other days, there were quite jolly during the entire six week course of the therapy.

During the days of being depressed, the scientists were trying to compare the Hamilton score with the variations in the speech pattern. It was found out that at the time of depression, the patient's speech became slow and more breathier. In addition, the team even saw an increase in the shimmer, jitter, and a slight increase ( two measures) of acoustic disturbance which can help in measuring the basic frequency, and increase the variations in the sound. Sometimes the speech which was high in shimmer and jitter would often sound rough and hoarse.

Now researchers are planning to create a database which would contain the acoustic details of the depression and the typical speech. This would be done by making a comparison of the speech pattern of each individual who have no mental illness and those suffering from depression. This particular information could be used by the phone app to check out and analyze the given information and provide a great amount of feedback on the basis of the individual's acoustic signature.

Combining medicine with technology is what is required in order to attract the young and teen population where there is a great increase in depression. This would be quite helpful for the parents as they would be easily be able to monitor the symptoms and find out if any kind of professional assistance is required or not.

However, there is still a long way for it. Researchers feel that there is still more amount of research and human factors that needs to be considered before the product can be useful. Also a lot of other factors and components need to be implemented to make this tool quite useful and handy.

Vijoy likes to write a lot about medical and scientific studies. Being a Journal Publishing Manager of a reputed university, it greatly helps him to identify the latest finding and scientific discoveries in the field of research.

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