Multimodal Depression Assessment Framework Integrating Personality and Gait for Older Adults With Medical Conditions

Elderly individuals often suffer from underlying medical conditions, resulting in a significant decline in quality of life and a heightened susceptibility to depression. Presently, AI screening tools based on behavioral indicators offer an objective and effective approach to diagnosing depression. However, current AI depression screening tools are primarily tailored to adolescents and adults, exhibiting shortcomings in their applicability and accuracy for elderly individuals with underlying medical conditions. To address the above issues, first, this paper constructs a depression dataset for elderly people with underlying diseases by using semi-structured interviews. Second, based on cognitive science insights, it is recognized that personality factors significantly influence behavioral expressions and also determine the attitudes of elderly individuals toward current life circumstances/health issues. Therefore, besides annotating depression severity, the Big Five-10 personality scale was utilized to annotate participant personalities. Finally, a late fusion-based multi-task learning framework was proposed, and the effects of introducing gait information and personality annotation on the performance of depression assessment were investigated. The experimental findings affirm the importance of integrating gait information and personality assessment in improving depression detection effectiveness. This study provides valuable foundational resources, as well as beneficial references and insights, for the research on depression in the elderly.