Deep Learning for Mobile Mental Health: Challenges and recent advances

Abstract

Mental health plays a key role in everyone’s day-to-day lives, impacting our thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. Also, over the past years, given their ubiquitous and affordable characteristics, the use of smartphones and wearable devices has grown rapidly and provided support within all aspects of mental health research and care—from screening and diagnosis to treatment and monitoring—and attained significant progress in improving remote mental health interventions. While there are still many challenges to be tackled in this emerging cross-disciplinary research field, such as data scarcity, lack of personalization, and privacy concerns, it is of primary importance that innovative signal processing and deep learning (DL) techniques are exploited. In particular, recent advances in DL can help provide a key enabling technology for the development of next-generation user-centric mobile mental health applications. In this article, we briefly introduce the basic principles associated with mobile device-based mental health analysis, review the main system components, and highlight the conventional technologies involved. We also describe several major challenges and various DL technologies that have potential for strongly contributing to dealing with these issues, and we discuss other problems to be addressed via research collaboration across multiple disciplines.