A monitoring device to objectively assess functional/ psychosocial impairment in older-age adults with major depression

抑郁症是最常见的精神疾病之一，是全球第四大残疾原因。在晚年，抑郁症会对生活质量产生巨大的负面影响，并会影响日常生活和社会关系的许多不同方面。除了情绪低落外，许多抑郁症患者的思考、计划和集中注意力的能力也会下降，人们认为这些问题可能与日常生活中的问题直接相关。这是研究和理解的一个重要环节，但是在如何准确地测量日常活动和社会互动方面存在问题。该研究项目旨在开发一种可由个人佩戴的设备，并将非常准确地测量活动量和与他人的互动（但为了保护人们的隐私，该设备不会记录实际对话）。这将首次使研究人员能够精确地研究抑郁症的不同方面，如情绪低落和思维能力下降，与日常生活和社会交往的关系。由于这些领域的特殊问题，目前的项目将集中在老年人，但这种设备将有潜在的应用在许多其他领域的未来。

Depression is one of the most common psychiatric disorders, being the fourth highest cause of disability worldwide. In later-life, depression can have a huge negative impact on quality of life and can affect many different aspects of day to day living and social relationships. As well as suffering from low mood, many individuals with depression show a reduced ability to think, plan and concentrate and it is thought that these problems may link directly to the problems with day to day living. This is an important link to study and understand, however there are problems in how accurately measurements of daily activity and social interactions can be obtained. This research project intends to develop a device that can be worn by an individual and will measure very accurately the amount of activity and interactions with others (but to protect the privacy of people, the device will not record actual conversations). This, for the first time, will allow researchers to precisely examine how different aspects of depression, such as low mood and reduced thinking ability, relate to day to day living and social interactions. Because of particular problems in these areas, the present project will focus on older age people but this device will have potential applications in many other areas in the future.