Mobile cloud-based depression diagnosis using an ontology and a Bayesian network

Abstract

Recently, depression has becomes a widespread disease throughout the world. However, most people are not aware of the possibility of becoming depressed during their daily lives. Therefore, obtaining an accurate diagnosis of depression is an important issue in healthcare. In this study, we built an inference model based on an ontology and a Bayesian network to infer the possibility of becoming depressed, and we implemented a prototype using a mobile agent platform as a proof-of-concept in the mobile cloud. We developed an ontology model based on the terminology used to describe depression and we utilized a Bayesian network to infer the probability of becoming depressed. We also implemented the system using multi-agents to run on the Android platform, thereby demonstrating the feasibility of this method, and we addressed various implementation issues. The results showed that our method may be useful for inferring a diagnosis of depression. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.