Deploying a robotic positive psychology coach to improve college students' psychological well-being.

Despite the increase in awareness and support for mental health, college students' mental health is reported to decline every year in many countries. Several interactive technologies for mental health have been proposed and are aiming to make therapeutic service more accessible, but most of them only provide one-way passive contents for their users, such as psycho-education, health monitoring, and clinical assessment. We present a robotic coach that not only delivers interactive positive psychology interventions but also provides other useful skills to build rapport with college students.

Interpretation of Depression Detection Models via Feature Selection Methods.

Given the prevalence of depression worldwide and its major impact on society, several studies employed artificial intelligence modelling to automatically detect and assess depression. However, interpretation of these models and cues are rarely discussed in detail in the AI community, but have received increased attention lately. In this study, we aim to analyse the commonly selected features using a proposed framework of several feature selection methods and their effect on the classification results, which will provide an interpretation of the depression detection model.

A Robotic Companion for Psychological Well-being: A Long-term Investigation of Companionship and Therapeutic Alliance.

Social support plays a crucial role in managing and enhancing one's mental health and well-being. In order to explore the role of a robot's companion-like behavior on its therapeutic interventions, we conducted an eight-week-long deployment study with seventy participants to compare the impact of (1) a with only assistant-like skills, (2) a with additional instructive positive psychology interventions, and (3) a that delivered the same interventions in a peer-like and supportive manner. The companion-like robot was shown to be the most effective in building a positive therapeutic alliance with people, enhancing participants' well-being and readiness for change.

Evaluating and Validating Emotion Elicitation Using English and Arabic Movie Clips on a Saudi Sample.

With the advancement of technology in both hardware and software, estimating human affective states has become possible. Currently, movie clips are used as they are a widely-accepted method of eliciting emotions in a replicable way. However, cultural differences might influence the effectiveness of some video clips to elicit the target emotions.

The Effectiveness of Depth Data in Liveness Face Authentication Using 3D Sensor Cameras.

Even though biometric technology increases the security of systems that use it, they are prone to spoof attacks where attempts of fraudulent biometrics are used. To overcome these risks, techniques on detecting liveness of the biometric measure are employed. For example, in systems that utilise face authentication as biometrics, a liveness is assured using an estimation of blood flow, or analysis of quality of the face image.

Cross-Cultural Detection of Depression from Nonverbal Behaviour.

Millions of people worldwide suffer from depression. Do commonalities exist in their nonverbal behavior that would enable cross-culturally viable screening and assessment of severity? We investigated the generalisability of an approach to detect depression severity cross-culturally using video-recorded clinical interviews from Australia, the USA and Germany. The material varied in type of interview, subtypes of depression and inclusion healthy control subjects, cultural background, and recording environment.