Evaluation of the severity of major depression using a voice index for emotional arousal

We first developed an arousal level voice index (ALVI) to measure arousal levels using the Interactive Emotional Dyadic Motion Capture database. Then, we calculated ALVI from the voices of depressed patients from two hospitals H1 and H2 and compared them with the severity of depression as measured by the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HAM-D). Depending on the HAM-D score, the datasets were classified into a no depression (HAM-D<8) and a depression group (HAM-D≥8) for each hospital. A comparison of the mean ALVI between the groups was performed using the Wilcoxon rank-sum test.