Depression has impacted millions of people world-wide and has become one of the most prevalent mental disorders. Early mental disorder detection can lead to cost savings for public health agencies and avoid the onset of other major comorbidities. Additionally, the shortage of specialized personnel is a critical issue because clinical depression diagnosis is highly dependent on expert professionals and is time-consuming.In this study, we explore the use of GPT-4 for clinical depression assessment based on transcript analysis. We examine the model’s ability to classify patient interviews into binary categories: depressed and not depressed. A comparative analysis is conducted considering prompt complexity (e.g., using both simple and complex prompts), as well as varied temperature settings, to assess the impact of prompt complexity and randomness on the model’s performance. Results indicate that GPT-4 exhibits considerable variability in accuracy and F1-Score across configurations, with optimal performance observed at lower temperature values (0.0-0.2) for complex prompts. However, beyond a certain threshold (temperature ≥ 0.3), the relationship between randomness and performance becomes unpredictable, diminishing the gains from prompt complexity. These findings suggest that, while GPT-4 shows promise for clinical assessment, the configuration of the prompts and model parameters requires careful calibration to ensure consistent results. This preliminary study contributes to understanding the dynamics between prompt engineering and large language models, offering insights for future development of AI-powered tools in clinical settings.

Wearable sensors utilize small, low-cost, noninvasive, and wireless components. These sensors capture vital signs, allowing the monitoring of patients remotely. In this manner, they are efficient tools to enhance patient care and can be used to monitor vulnerable populations, and keep track of the development of chronic diseases, and the transmission of infectious illnesses – such as during pandemics. However, there are many challenges to monitoring patients using wearables, with massive data generation and battery power consumption being significant constraints. Strategies to reduce data generation should be applied taking into account the patient’s clinical status and health risks. Previous studies took advantage of single early-warning scores (EWS) utilized in infirmaries to detect emergencies, reduce transmissions, and be a reference for self-adaptive features embedded in the devices. Our work proposes the use of composite EWS to infer health deterioration risk, minimize data transmissions and power consumption, and reduce excessive alarms through self-adaptive features based on these scores. We also compare our method with previous studies using real patient data. Further, we propose applying self-adaptive features to sampling, processing, and transmission rates. Our method demonstrated enhanced data reduction, 81% fewer readings than the baseline, significant pruning of the number of alarms, and dynamic and automatic inference of patient risk.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled novel solutions for monitoring patients’ health through wearable sensors in conditions of both non-communicable and infectious diseases. In this paper, we report work in progress involving the development of an IoT-based COVID-19 health monitoring system that can effectively monitor the essential physiological functions of a patient through wireless sensors, thus supporting the early detection of severe cases and the continuous assessment of the patient status. The work provides several main contributions, as it includes: (i) a brief description of the current IoT-based system for remote monitoring of COVID-19 patients; (ii) a description of embedded characteristics of our device, including its contextual functions, early warning score mechanisms and self-adaptive features; and (iii) a description of our preliminary experiment results. Our proposed solution reduced drastically the amount of redundancy in data and still maintain monitoring accuracy. Given the COVID-19 scenarios, in which human resources are extended to the limit and the number of patients in severe conditions is often high, a system that can support IoT-based continuous monitoring are essential to identify changes in clinical status promptly and accurately and can potentially transform the way patients are monitored.

Public health monitoring methods have limitations that affect the quality of data. To support traditional data collection efforts, personal smart technologies can be used to collect multimodal, real-time and continuous data. Public health agencies can then study and predict the prevalence of conditions in a population using advanced analytics. Apple Health is one of the most popular sources of health data from personal devices, supporting diverse sensors that collect a wide range of information from heart rate to blood pressure and sleep. This paper introduces a system that uses a mobile health platform to extract Apple Health data to support public health monitoring. Development, security and privacy considerations are discussed, and a pilot study is proposed which collects several objective sensor data from Apple Health as well as self-report perceived stress (both using the platform) to create stress prediction models. Ultimately, the system described can provide public health agencies with novel methods to collect multimodal data from consumer devices as well as implement interventions in real-time to minimize the impact of conditions, such as stress, in a population. The system advances the state-of-the-art in health monitoring by being one of the first works to leverage health data from consumer-level personal devices for public health.