Nautilus

Mood Ring—Cell Phones Can Hear Depression in People’s Voices

Three examples of speech from a person with bipolar disorder. The rows show one second each of manic, euthymic (normal), and depressed speech. The colored rectangles show various features extracted from the speech, where color indicates the amplitude of that feature for that speaker. The 10 features measure qualities of the person’s voice like pitch, variability of pitch, energy, and how pressured the speech is (but not in a one-to-one correspondence with those features). The picture shows that features 1 and 9 are higher in manic speech and lower in

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