What the Face and Voice Reveal: Developing a Diagnostic Aid for Major Depression

Assoc. Prof. Roland Goecke (University of Canberra / Australian National University)

GENERAL IEEE ACT CS seminar

DATE: 2013-05-14
TIME: 17:30:00 - 18:30:00
LOCATION: NICTA Seminar room (ground floor, 7 London Cct).
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ABSTRACT:
Depression and other mood disorders are common and disabling disorders. Their impact on individuals and families is profound. The WHO Global Burden of Disease reports quantify depression as the leading cause of disability world-wide. Despite the high prevalence, current clinical practice depends almost exclusively on self-report and clinical opinion, risking a range of subjective biases. There currently exist no laboratory-based measures of illness expression, course and recovery, and no objective markers of end-points for interventions in both clinical and research settings. In this talk, I will present an overview of a project to develop affective sensing technology that supports clinicians in the diagnosis and monitoring of treatment progress. This technology is based on a multimodal analysis of facial expressions and movements, body posture, head movements as well as vocal expressions. Results from a recently completed pilot study in this collaborative project with the Black Dog Institute (Sydney), University of New South Wales and the Queensland Institute of Medical Research (Brisbane) demonstrated that this approach can achieve over 90% agreement with clinical assessment, an encouraging result to continue this research.

Please RSVP to: ieeeact@gmail.com

IEEE ACT web pages are at http://www.ieeeact.org/ not at the standard IEEE address.
BIO:
Dr Roland Goecke is an Associate Professor in the Information Technology & Engineering academic program at the Faculty of ESTeM, University of Canberra. He is the Head of the Vision and Sensing Group and the Deputy Chair of the Human-Centred Computing Research Laboratory. Dr Goecke is also the research program leader for the Information Technology & Engineering research program at the University of Canberra. He received his Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Rostock, Germany, in 1998 and his PhD in Computer Science from the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, in 2004. Before joining UC in December 2008, Dr Goecke worked as a Senior Research Scientist with Seeing Machines, as a Researcher at the NICTA Canberra Research Labs, and as a Research Fellow at the Fraunhofer Institutes for Computer Graphics, Germany. His research interests are in affective computing, pattern recognition, computer vision, human-computer interaction, multimodal signal processing and e-research. He is a member of the IEEE.