Signal Processing Grand Challenge 2023 – E-Prevention: Sleep Behavior as an Indicator of Relapses in Psychotic Patients

This paper presents the approach and results of USC SAIL’s submission to the Signal Processing Grand Challenge 2023 – e-Prevention (Task 2), on detecting relapses in psychotic patients. Relapse prediction has proven to be challenging, primarily due to the heterogeneity of symptoms and responses to treatment between individuals. We address these challenges by investigating the use of sleep behavior features to estimate relapse days as outliers in an unsupervised machine learning setting. We extract informative features from human activity and heart rate data collected in the wild, and evaluate various combinations of feature types and time resolutions. We found that short-time sleep behavior features outperformed their awake counterparts and larger time intervals. Our submission was ranked 3rd in the Task’s official leaderboard, demonstrating the potential of such features as an objective and non-invasive predictor of psychotic relapses.