A Novel Gait Analysis Method Based on The Pseudo-Velocity Model for Depression Detection

As the occurrence of depression in society becomes increasingly more common, it is an urgent task to find more objective and effective tools for real-time depression assessment. Gait analysis offers a new low-cost and contactless method for depression diagnosis. Therefore, interest in gait-based depression detection using depth sensors, such as Kinect, has grown rapidly in recent years. In this paper, a pseudo-velocity model is built to analyze the abnormal gait related to the depression by combining the velocity and angular velocity of the joints. Subsequently, we extract some features in time and frequency domain from our model to establish the classification model for depression detection. Experimental results on depression gait data recordings from 43 scored-depressed and 52 non-depressed individuals show that the proposed method achieves a good classification accuracy of 92.35 % and is superior to other existing methods. The outstanding classification performance suggests that the proposed method has notential clinical value in depression detection. © 2021 IEEE.