A depression that you don't know even if you have it, hold it with a watch on your wrist.

[Anchor]
Depression, a mental illness, is important to treat on time, but it is often passed on without knowing the symptoms.

However, it would be burdensome and difficult for depression patients to go to the hospital and get a diagnosis in person.

Now, with a smart watch on your wrist, you can predict depression symptoms.

This is reporter Park Na-yeon.

[Reporter]
Since 2022 when the number of people with depression in Korea exceeded 1 million,
The number is increasing steeply every
year.

[Lee Kyung-wook / Professor of Psychiatry at Uijeongbu St. Mary's Hospital: Since COVID-19, the number of depressed patients has been increasing, especially economic problems. It is increasing a lot among young people due to occupational and employment problems.

However, even if you have depression, you are not aware of the symptoms well, or even if you do, the rate of going to the hospital yourself is low.

However, domestic researchers have developed a technology to diagnose depressive symptoms using biometric data collected by smart watches.

The researchers paid attention to "melatonin," a biorhythmic indicator that regulates various physiological effects and behaviors such as heart rate and activity of our body.This is because disturbance in melatonin concentration

leads to sleep problems such as insomnia and changes in appetite, leading to depression.

In response, the researchers developed an algorithm that can diagnose depression by analyzing how much disturbance there has been in melatonin biorerhythmic data over a certain period of time.

As a result of having 800 people wear smart watches with the developed algorithm and finding out whether they are depressed along with a survey, it was confirmed that six representative symptoms of depression can be predicted.

In particular, the greater the melatonin hormone concentration disturbance, the higher the severity of depression.

[Kim Daewook / Professor of Brain Cognitive Science at KAIST: A biological clock in our brain continuously when wearable activity data and heart rate data are entered as input values. You can think of it as developing an algorithm that can predict these things.

The researchers expected that the developed technology could be effectively used to manage depression in that it could monitor biometric data without space or time constraints.

Furthermore, it announced that it will expand the technology to other mental diseases such as obsessive compulsion and anxiety disorders.

The researchers plan to release a depression prediction application that can be used on general smartwatches as early as April through additional research.

I'm Park Nayeon of YTN Science.


Video coverage: Kim Young-hwan