Monitoring the Physiology of Depression
Team: Noah Okada, Stanley Chen, Mercedes Balcells
In 2021, I conducted research alongside a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Albizu University in Miami, and Instituto Politecnico Nacional in Mexico to develop a system to monitor digital biomarkers of depression. In this project, we monitored changes in cardiovascular activity to develop artificial intelligence models to predict disease progression in depression.
The Experiment
Developing Experiments to Monitor Physiological Responses
Using Apple Watch and Metric-Wire we designed an experiment to collect continuous physiological and daily activity data from healthy controls. We then designed questionnaires to collective subjective reports about each participant's affective states and motivations at variable time-points throughout the day.
The Review
Surveying the Literature
We conducted a literature review using NLP methods from the NIH Pubtator toolkit to survey 7000 medical research articles for comorbidity of depression with other disorders and diseases. These results helped us to identify a strong correlation between depression and cardiovascular disease.