Wearable Long-Term Social Sensing for Mental Wellbeing

Abstract

Long-term wellbeing monitoring is an underlying theme in many local and national policies and procedures outlined by governments and health care services. Natural, efficacious, and trustworthy monitoring by using wearable sensors is necessary for researchers to find and establish the interrelationships of affective computing, body sensor networks (BSNs), social signal processing, and physical mental health. Specially, Giancarlo Fortino has an outstanding contribution for applying BSNs on health monitoring. This paper investigated how technology can help to objectively monitor an individual’s wellbeing in a naturalistic environment. For this purpose, we designed and implemented a wearable device with the integration of multi-sensors which consist of audio sensing, behavior monitoring, environment, and physiological sensing. In order to avoid privacy issues, four audio-wellbeing features are embedded into a wearable hardware platform to automatically evaluate speech information without preserving raw audio data. In addition, four weeks of long-term monitoring experiment studies have been conducted in conjunction with a series of wellbeing questionnaires in a group of students. The relationships between physical and mental health were investigated objectively by utilizing data from speech, behavioral activities and ambient factors in a completely natural daily situation.