An Augmented Teleconsultation Platform for Depressive Disorders

Depressive disorders are a leading cause of morbility and disability in the working population worldwide. Psychiatric assessment and treatment of depressive disorders may be improved by using objective behavioral and physiological biomarkers. In this work we present a psychiatry telemedicine platform where two important biomarkers of depression, eye-blinking rate and heart rate variability, are computed from the video stream and shown to the clinician in real time during teleconsultation. In order to validate our video processing methods, we use a public annotated dataset with image and photoplethysmography information, complemented by us with eye blinking information. For the eye-blinking detection, we obtained 94%±16% precision in the best scenario. For the estimation of %LF and LF/HF, the mean errors obtained are 16.9NU and 1.1, respectively, outperforming the state of the art. These results show the potential of the proposed telemedicine platform.