Remote smartphone-based speech collection: acceptance and barriers in individuals with major depressive disorder
This addresses the practical challenge of implementing remote speech monitoring for mental health research and care in individuals with major depressive disorder, though it is incremental as it focuses on user acceptance rather than novel methods.
The study investigated the acceptability of remote smartphone-based speech collection among 384 individuals with major depressive disorder, finding that participants were more comfortable with scripted tasks than free speech tasks, with depression severity and country as significant predictors of comfort, and identified common barriers like missed notifications and low mood.
The ease of in-the-wild speech recording using smartphones has sparked considerable interest in the combined application of speech, remote measurement technology (RMT) and advanced analytics as a research and healthcare tool. For this to be realised, the acceptability of remote speech collection to the user must be established, in addition to feasibility from an analytical perspective. To understand the acceptance, facilitators, and barriers of smartphone-based speech recording, we invited 384 individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) from the Remote Assessment of Disease and Relapse - Central Nervous System (RADAR-CNS) research programme in Spain and the UK to complete a survey on their experiences recording their speech. In this analysis, we demonstrate that study participants were more comfortable completing a scripted speech task than a free speech task. For both speech tasks, we found depression severity and country to be significant predictors of comfort. Not seeing smartphone notifications of the scheduled speech tasks, low mood and forgetfulness were the most commonly reported obstacles to providing speech recordings.