TPM: A Voice-based Tele-PTSD Monitor

Intelligent Automation proposes to develop voice-based automated Tele-PTSD Monitor (TPM), which can remotely screen, monitor, and provide assistance to clinicians in diagnosing a PTSD patient"s mental healthiness and readiness. A soldier (or other service man/women who may suffer from PTSD) can access the TPM system via a Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) or the Internet. The voice data is sent to the server and the PTSD scoring web service invokes the PTSD Scoring Engine (PTSD-SE) to compute mental healthiness scores of the soldier. If the score indicates that the user is likely to have severe PTSD symptoms, the system notifies clinicians for further confirmation via email or text messaging. The low cost server-client-based TPM system is easily field-deployable. The PTSD-SE is the"brain"of the voice-based TPM system. It processes the voice data, extracts different types of salient features, computes PTSD scores based on an enhanced committee machine algorithm, and performs post analysis for score refinement. The PTSD-SE only relies on voice to perform remote PTSD monitoring and does not require costly video conferencing facility or cumbersome physiological sensors. It mitigates impact of account emotion changes on PTSD scoring and addresses individual variations.