Athanasios Tsionas, Aristotelis Lazaridis and Ioannis Vlahavas. “Serious Game Development for the Diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder Cases Using Machine Learning Methods”. Games and AI - Technological, Cultural and Societal aspects (GAITECUS0), A SETN 2020 Workshop, Athens, Greece, 2-4 September, 2020.
Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a serious mental disorder that affects millions of adults, occasionally leading to life-threatening results. Current diagnostic tools for MDD mostly consist of questionnaires and/or long, specialized therapy sessions. In this work we present a serious game called “The Delivery”, developed for diagnosing MDD in players. The video game has the players immerse into a realistic scenario, the development of which depends on their actions, that is, through conversations with in-game characters, completion of quests, and interactions with the environment. All in-game features and mechanics are designed to correspond to specific diagnostic criteria for MDD. We recorded gameplay data from labeled players (both MDD and non-MDD cases) in order to train Machine Learning models that can accurately distinguish gameplay behaviors MDD-positive and MDD-negative players.
