FedTherapist: Mental Health Monitoring with User-Generated Linguistic Expressions on Smartphones via Federated Learning

Jaemin Shin, Hyungjun Yoon, Seungjoo Lee, Sungjoon Park, Yunxin Liu, Jinho Choi, Sung-Ju Lee


Abstract
Psychiatrists diagnose mental disorders via the linguistic use of patients. Still, due to data privacy, existing passive mental health monitoring systems use alternative features such as activity, app usage, and location via mobile devices. We propose FedTherapist, a mobile mental health monitoring system that utilizes continuous speech and keyboard input in a privacy-preserving way via federated learning. We explore multiple model designs by comparing their performance and overhead for FedTherapist to overcome the complex nature of on-device language model training on smartphones. We further propose a Context-Aware Language Learning (CALL) methodology to effectively utilize smartphones’ large and noisy text for mental health signal sensing. Our IRB-approved evaluation of the prediction of self-reported depression, stress, anxiety, and mood from 46 participants shows higher accuracy of FedTherapist compared with the performance with non-language features, achieving 0.15 AUROC improvement and 8.21% MAE reduction.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.734
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11971–11988
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.734
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.734
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jaemin Shin, Hyungjun Yoon, Seungjoo Lee, Sungjoon Park, Yunxin Liu, Jinho Choi, and Sung-Ju Lee. 2023. FedTherapist: Mental Health Monitoring with User-Generated Linguistic Expressions on Smartphones via Federated Learning. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 11971–11988, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
FedTherapist: Mental Health Monitoring with User-Generated Linguistic Expressions on Smartphones via Federated Learning (Shin et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.734.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.734.mp4