Depressed? This Software Can Spot Symptoms
It is well known that people with stress and depression make up a large proportion of daily GP clinic visits. The modern world seems to take it’s toll and right across the population depression eats away at thousands of people. Pedesis has been designed to flag up potential sufferers, allowing them to seek help before the problem spirals.
Researchers led by Professor Yair Neuman at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negav developed this software, which has been designed around social networking blogs. Over 17,000 bloggers gave their permission to have their writings scanned by the software, and the results were then correlated and compared to a diagnosis given by human detection. The results showed that the program gave the same results as the physician on 78% of cases.
The program is based on the words people use when they share their daily events via social networking sites, words like black, when used with loneliness or sleep deprivation for example, are flagged as potential depression patients, as well as glaringly obvious terms such as suicide or lost the will to live.
There has been some discussion of how this tool would be best used, as patient consent needs to be given, whether this will prove as useful as the researchers hope is as yet unknown, however it could be a tool for someone who presents with vague symptoms where diagnosis is proving problematic, or used on social sites with sign up consent by users.
