Detecting Depression in Elderly People by Using Artificial Neural Network

The possibility of depression is common in the elderly. Novel technologies allow us to monitor people related to depression. Hence, a model was provided to detect depression in elderly based on artificial neural network (ANN).

The present study is an applied descriptive-survey research. Forty elderly people were randomly selected from the Elderly Care Center in Gonbad Kavous, Golestan, Iran in 2019. Data were obtained through interview. The data were randomly divided in to two groups of training and testing. In training phase by using first dataset (70%), three layers network is considered. Interrelation weights between variables, optimum transfer function and optimum number of hidden layer were obtained. The sum of squared errors, receiver operating characteristic curve criterion and accuracy were used to select the optimum ANN. The optimum model tested and validated (p < 0.001) with second dataset (30%).

The sigmoid transfer function in hidden and output layers with 5 nods (SSE = 131), one hidden layer with 15 neurons was considered as optimum model. Receiver operating characteristic curve criterion and accuracy were obtained equal to 0.913 and 94.79% respectively. The confusion matrix was showed high sensitivity (97.45%) and specificity (99.25%) in the diagnosis of depression. Age, gender, income, polarity outgoing messages to family, incoming calls, time active in the day, polarity incoming messages from family, time sleep in the day were obtained as a significant set for input layer of the optimum model. In addition, the optimum model has been quite successful in identifying normal and depressed elderly.

This research applied an ANN model for detection of depression in the elderly. ANN can be used as a computational tools for early diagnosis of depression in the elderly People.