Mental Health Evaluation and Assistance for Visually Impaired People

Kavita Pandey; Dhiraj Pandey

doi:10.4108/eetsis.vi.2931

Authors

Dr. Kavita Pandey Jaypee Institute of Information Technology
Dr. Dhiraj Pandey JSS Academy of Technical Education, Noida, India

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.4108/eetsis.vi.2931

Keywords:

Mental Health, visually impaired, monitoring and assistance, depression

Abstract

Earlier, three-person out of every 10 persons had been suffering from mental health issues but nowadays this situation became worsened due to the pandemic. The number of individuals suffering from mental health has been increasing day by day. One of the WHO reports states that 3.8% of the population has been affected due to depression. Although such an important issue in human health, still it is one of the neglected health sectors around the world. This situation is more worsened among special need people as they feel more anxiety disorders and loneliness in comparison to their sighted peers. Technology is helping us to solve several such problems which are difficult to discuss with peers and worsen over time if not taken preventively on time. In this article, a technological solution using facial expression and voice-based assistance has been used. This would especially help in monitoring the mood of visually challenged people. Their mental health can be monitored and assistance would be provided as per the severity of the situation. Mental health is analyzed based on emotion recognition from facial expressions and psychometric evaluations. A health score would be calculated which is used to judge the severity of mental health. An assessment report would also be generated and sent to the guardian of the user. The whole application is designed with a voice assistance platform using Dart (Flutter) and firebase as storage for all interactions with the visually challenged person.

References

Global Estimates of Vision loss, https://www.iapb.org/learn/vision-atlas/magnitude-and-projections/global/, [Accessed: September 2022]

Blindness and Vision Impairment, https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/blindness-and-visual-impairment, [Accessed: September, 2022]

Pandey, D., & Pandey, K., "An Assistive Technology-based Approach towards Helping Visually Impaired People," 2021 9th International Conference on Reliability, Infocom Technologies and Optimization (Trends and Future Directions) (ICRITO), Sept. 3-4, 2021, pp. 1-5

Pandey, K., Yadav, V., Pandey, D., & Vikhram, S., “MAGIC-I as Assistance for the Visually Impaired People”, Recent Advances in Computer Science and Communications, Vol. 14, Issue 9, pp. 3030-3042, June, 2021

Pandey, K., Pandey, D., & Khan, R., “Chapter six - A Medical Assistant for the Visually Impaired”, in book titled as “Advancements in Bio-Medical Image Processing and Authentication in Telemedicine”, IGI Global, February, 2023. pp. 91-110. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-6684-6957-6.ch006

Van Der Aa, H. P., Margrain, T. H., Van Rens, G. H., Heymans, M. W., & van Nispen, R. M., “Psychosocial interventions to improve mental health in adults with vision impairment: systematic review and meta‐analysis”, Ophthalmic and Physiological Optics, Vol. 36, Issue 5, pp. 584-606, 2016.

Augestad, L. B., “Mental health among children and young adults with visual impairments: A systematic review”, Journal of visual impairment & blindness, Vol. 111, Issue 5, pp. 411-425, 2017.

Ghosal, D., Majumder, N., Poria, S., Chhaya, N., & Gelbukh, A. , “Dialoguegcn: A graph convolutional neural network for emotion recognition in conversation”, arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.11540, August, 2019.

Akhtar, M. S., Chauhan, D. S., Ghosal, D., Poria, S., Ekbal, A., & Bhattacharyya, P., “Multi-task learning for multi-modal emotion recognition and sentiment analysis”, arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.05812,May, 2019.

Ćosić, K., Popović, S., Šarlija, M., Kesedžić, I., & Jovanovic, T. , “Artificial intelligence in prediction of mental health disorders induced by the COVID-19 pandemic among health care workers”, Croatian medical journal, Vol. 61, Issue 3, pp. 279-288, June 2020.

Garcia-Ceja, E., Riegler, M., Nordgreen, T., Jakobsen, P., Odegaard, K. J., & Tørresen, J., “Mental health monitoring with multimodal sensing and machine learning: A survey. Pervasive and Mobile Computing”, Vol. 51, pp. 1-26, Dec., 2018.

Wang, R., Campbell, A. T., & Zhou, X. , “Using opportunistic face logging from smartphone to infer mental health: challenges and future directions”, In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computer, pp. 683-692, September, 2015.

Aslam, T., Qadri, S., Shehzad, M., Qadri, S. F., Razzaq, A., & Shah, S., “Emotion Based Facial Expression Detection Using Machine Learning”, Life Science Journal, Vol. 17, Issue 8, pp. 35-43, August, 2020.

Cheng, X., Wang, X., Ouyang, T., & Feng, Z., “Advances in emotion recognition: link to depressive disorder”, In Neurological and Mental Disorders, IntechOpen, April, 2020.

Jaiswal, S., Valstar, M., Kusumam, K., & Greenhalgh, C.,“Virtual human questionnaire for analysis of depression, anxiety and personality”, In Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, pp. 81-87, July, 2019.

Omar, R., Rahman, M. H. A., Knight, V. F., Mustaphal, M., & Mohammed, Z., “Mental health state and quality of life questionnaire in low vision assessment: a case report” BMC research notes, Vol. 7, Issue 1, pp. 1-4. Dec.,2014.

Weih, L. M., Hassell, J. B., & Keeffe, J., “Assessment of the impact of vision impairment. Investigative ophthalmology & visual science”, Vol. 43, Issue 4, pp. 927-935, April, 2002.

Zheng, D. D., Christ, S. L., Lam, B. L., Arheart, K. L., Galor, A., & Lee, D. J., “Increased mortality risk among the visually impaired: the roles of mental well-being and preventive care practices”, Investigative ophthalmology & visual science, 53(6), 2685-2692, May, 2012.

Demmin, D. L., & Silverstein, S. M., “Visual impairment and mental health: unmet needs and treatment options”, Clinical Ophthalmology (Auckland, NZ), Vol. 14, pp. 4229- 4251, 2020.

Horowitz, A., & Reinhardt, J. P, “Adequacy of the mental health system in meeting the needs of adults who are visually impaired”, Journal of visual impairment & blindness, Vol. 100, pp. 871-874, 2006.

Kohda, Y., Monma, T., Yamane, M., Mitsui, T., Ando, K., Jesmin, S., & Takeda, F., “Mental health status and related factors among visually impaired athletes”, Journal of Clinical Medicine Research, Vol. 11, Issue 11, pp. 729-739, Nov., 2019.

Yoshida, T., Ichikawa, T., ISHIKAWA, T., & HORI, M., “Mental health of visually and hearing impaired students from the viewpoint of the University Personality Inventory”, Psychiatry and clinical neurosciences, Vol. 52, Issue 4, pp. 413-418, July, 1998

Dart programming language, https://dart.dev/, [Accessed: April, 2022]