Skip to main content

Monitoring Moods in Elderly People through Voice Processing

  • Conference paper
Ambient Assisted Living and Daily Activities (IWAAL 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 8868))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Depression is a mental illness that is difficult to diagnose and treat. This mental disorder affects many older adults due several reasons, for instance because of their physical limitations and the natural reduction of their social circle. This article presents a system for monitoring the mood of the elderly through voice processing. The system is particularly focused on detecting sadness, which allows caregivers of family members to react on-time in supporting the person in need. The sadness recognition is done by classifying emotions in groups, according to the Circumflex Model of Affect. After evaluating the system using several emotion databases, the obtained results indicate that this solution is able to recognize 94% of the cases in men and 79% in women. This solution can be embedded in ubiquitous systems that monitor the mood of people in several scenarios.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Tilvis, R.S., Routasalo, P., Karppinen, H., Strandberg, T.E., Kautiainen, H., Pitkala, K.H.: Social isolation, social activity and loneliness as survival indicators in old age: a nationwide survey with a 7-year follow-up. European Geriatric Medicine 3(1), 18–22 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Cornwell, E.Y., Wwaite, L.J.: Social Disconnectedness, Perceived Isolation, and Health among Older Adults. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 50(1), 31–48 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Cohen, S., Mermelstein, R., Kamarck, T., Hoberman, H.: Measuring the functional components of social support. In: Sarason, I.G., Sarason, B.R. (eds.) Social support: theory, research and application, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht (1985)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Schuller, B.: The Computational Paralinguistics Challenge. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine 29(4), 97–101 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Muñoz, D., Gutierrez, F., Ochoa, S.F., Baloian, N.: Enhancing Social Interaction between Older Adults and Their Families. In: Nugent, C., Coronato, A., Bravo, J. (eds.) IWAAL 2013. LNCS, vol. 8277, pp. 47–54. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  6. Dickerson, R., Gorlin, E., Stankovic, J.: Empath: a continuous remote emotional health monitoring system for depressive illness. In: Proc. of the Wireless Health 2011, San Diego, USA, pp. 5–14 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Alghowinem, S., Goecke, R., Wagner, M.: From joyous to clinically depressed: Mood detection using spontaneous speech. In: Proc. of the Int. Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2012), pp. 141–146. AAAI Press, Marco Island (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Eyben, F., Wöllmer, M., Schuller, B.: OpenSmile - The Munich Versatile and Fast Open-Source Audio Feature Extractor. In: Proc. of ACM Multimedia (MM), pp. 1459–1462. ACM Press, Florence (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Yaafe, http://yaafe.sourceforge.net/ (last visit: June 12, 2014)

  10. Cortes, C., Vapnik, V.: Support-vector networks. Machine Learning 20(3), 273–297 (1995)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  11. Steidl, S.: Vocal Emotion Recognition: State-of-the-Art in Classification of Real-Life Emotions. International Computer Science Institute (ICSI). Berkeley, USA (2010), http://www.stanford.edu/class/linguist287/materials/steidl.pdf (last visit: June 17, 2014)

  12. LibSVM, http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/libsvm/ (last visit: June 12, 2014)

  13. Haq, S., Jackson, P.J., Edge, J.D.: Audio-Visual Feature Selection and Reduction for Emotion Classification. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing, Tangalooma, Australia, pp. 185–190 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Burkhardt, F., Paeschke, A., Rolfes, M., Sendlmeier, W., Weiss, B.: A Database of German Emotional Speech. In: Proc. of Interspeech 2005, Lisbon, Portugal, pp. 1517–1520 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  15. López, J.M., Cearreta, I., Garay, N., de López Ipiña, K., Beristain, A.: Creación de una base de datos emocional bilingüe y multimodal. In: Proc. of the 7th Spanish Human Computer Interaction Conference, Interaccion 2006, Puertollano, Spain, pp. 55–66 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Eyben, F., Wöllmer, M., Schuller, B.: OpenSMILE: the Munich open Speech and Music Interpretation by Large Space Extraction toolkit. OpenSMILE Book (2010), http://openSMILE book 2.0-rc1 (last visit: June 14, 2014)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Russell, J.A.: A circumflex model of affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39(6), 1161–1178 (1980)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this paper

Cite this paper

Rojas, V., Ochoa, S.F., Hervás, R. (2014). Monitoring Moods in Elderly People through Voice Processing. In: Pecchia, L., Chen, L.L., Nugent, C., Bravo, J. (eds) Ambient Assisted Living and Daily Activities. IWAAL 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8868. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13105-4_22

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13105-4_22

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-13104-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-13105-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics