IHearYou: Linking Acoustic Features to DSM-5 Depressive Behavior Indicators

TL;DR

This paper introduces IHearYou, a privacy-preserving, on-device system that links speech acoustic features to DSM-5 depression indicators, enabling explainable and real-time depression assessment through passive household sensing.

Contribution

It presents a novel framework for automated depression detection using speech acoustics, with a reproducible protocol and real-time analysis on commodity hardware.

Findings

Passive voice sensing can produce clinically interpretable depression indicators.

The system achieves consistent feature-indicator associations on the DAIC-WOZ dataset.

End-to-end feasibility is validated through a TESS-based audio streaming experiment.

Abstract

Depression affects over millions people worldwide, yet diagnosis still relies on subjective self-reports and interviews that may not capture authentic behavior. We present IHearYou, an approach to automated depression detection focused on speech acoustics. Using passive sensing in household environments, IHearYou extracts voice features and links them to DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) indicators through a structured Linkage Framework instantiated for Major Depressive Disorder. The system runs locally to preserve privacy and includes a persistence schema and dashboard, presenting real-time throughput on a commodity laptop. To ensure reproducibility, we define a configuration-driven protocol with False Discovery Rate (FDR) correction and gender-stratified testing. Applied to the DAIC-WOZ dataset, this protocol reveals directionally consistent feature-indicator associations, while a TESS-based audio streaming experiment validates end-to-end feasibility. Our results show how passive voice sensing can be turned into explainable DSM-5 indicator scores, bridging the gap between black-box detection and clinically interpretable, on-device analysis.