Cloud based APIs to Detect Possible Signs of Depression and Risks of Suicidal Tendencies

Leveraging the power of technology to identify cases of depression and prevent suicides

Depression is one of the most common pathologies present in human beings, and however, it is not always evident, persons with depression and suicidal tendencies tend to present behavioral patterns many times so subtle that get unnoticed by most people, and this is something normal, since not everyone has knowledge on these topics, after all, one simply can't know everything, and here is where technology can help us, cloud computing and artificial intelligence can be integrated with psychology studies, and help identify these cases.

By leveraging the power of technology you can help parents identify possible signs of depression on their children utilizing the children's social networks data.

With the data it is possible to get important metrics like how many times per week a user has posted in a social network, how possitive or negative the person has been throughout the time, association betwwen a negative mood and places visited, the many different emotions a person has through the time, like happiness, anger or sadness.

We can also get information on the most common used phrases, and map them to common words and phrases used by persons with depression.

Below you will see some sample Power BI reports consuming the analyzed data for a user's social network.

Weekly Posts

Some studies mention that if a person posts more than 3-5 times per week, that may be a possible indicator of a person having depression, of course that indicator alone mean nothing, when compared to other indicators like the emotions and negativity of posts, it begins to take meaning.

Weekly Posts

Monthly Sentiment

How positive or negative a person has been during a particular period and the trend of each can also be a possible indicator of depression. How sad and dark/obscure the person's messages have been can also be a possible indicator.

Sentiment Per Year

Sentiment Per Month

Association Between Sentiment and Places

With the data analysis it is possible to identify association between sentiment and the visited places, which is a useful key to check if when a person has been negative tends to visits a place or if the negativity tends to be a result of visting a specific place.

Sentiment And Place Association

Emotional Analysis

Furthermore, the data can be compared to case of study and even create some preddictions like when a person will possibly feel sad, or angry in the future.

Weekly Sentiment With Filters

The previous report takes advantage of Power BI filtering capabilities to help the user identify sentiment in a range, and the weeks and months where that happens. In a real case scenario a therapist or a father can search for data where sentiment is below a given threshold (45% for example),, and the report will show the months and weeks in the year when this has happened.

Posts with Sentiment and Places

The previous report takes advantage of Power BI filtering capabilities to help the user identify the posts where there is a sentiment in a given range. This report allows the user to associate the places where a sentiment is low, which can be used as additional insight to discover places that could be causing depression, or the places a person visits in order to run away from depressive emotions.

For more information about the project you can send an email to services@pticostarica.com

What is PTI Costa Rica all about?

PTI stands for the spanish translation of
Professionals in Information Technology(in spanish Profesionales en Tecnologías en Información)

It was created from a desire to work in videogame development and at the same time give back to the world by using and mixing the experience and knowledge I have gathered throughtout my life,
which includes skills such as programming, software architecture, pscyhology, social responsibility, and more.

I believe that videogames have the best potential to reach more people and to really engage them, and I know that in order to really fix any problem you need to solve it from its roots, otherwise the same problems will eventually appear again.

Many of the problems which exist in today's society have not been solved because there is still more to change from its sources.

Addictions for example, are often the symptom of other problems such as family conflicts, traumatic events, mental illness, rejection, among others.

Generally, society members don't know the root causes of someones problems, which eventually turns in the well known discrimination towards people in need of help.

Also, even with the programs that exists today which try to help people in need, these will not be enough as long as the behavior from society members towards this people don't change.
This behavior is actually one of the reasons for relapse.

And it is not that society members are bad, but that we have been educated in a way where we discriminate, where we fear what we don't know and where we don't go deep in the causes behind the problems. Even in our jobs, specially in IT related fields we are usually told "patch it", we'll deal with the root cause later, which generally does not happen.

I firmly believe that videogames work better where other programs have failed, because as mentioned before they can reach bigger audiences, because with games we can also simulate real life situations, and create challenging and engaging gameplay evoking desired emotions that cause the learned topics last for long and not be forgotten easily.